Chapter 20: Nevada and Utah
June 3, 1998
5/12 This is being written from Far Horizons 49er Trailer Village, near Plymouth, in Amador County CA. It's raining here too, and not likely to quit in the near future. Getting here should have been a pretty drive - over the Bay Bridge, through the windmill- topped hills behind Hayward, across lush irrigated farmlands, and up into the gently rolling live-oak-covered foothills. But we really couldn't see much of it through the rain and mist. At least the rain will have washed most of the salt off the truck and trailer. After 8 days on the oceanfront, we could hardly see out of the windows. The RV park is very parklike - lots of grass and trees, with a stream running through the middle crossed with decorative bridges, dammed to form a small pond, with a fountain tinkling in the middle of the pond. It's modem friendly. On our second evening there, our power died just before bedtime. Our little power line tester - the kind with a row of three little lights - indicated no problem at the power plug outside, so I spent half an hour trying to find the problem within our trailer. Finally, I went back outside with a digital voltmeter and measured the plug again. It showed about 65 volts between hot and neutral, and also 65 volts between neutral and ground. Very strange! I moved our plug over to an adjacent vacant site, and all was well. Next morning I reported the problem to the office, and an electrician showed up an hour later, just as we were leaving. He opened up the box, and found that the neutral connection was badly corroded, loose, and had been arcing, with part of the connection eaten away. Moral: don't depend on cheap testers.
5/13 Wine tasting day - a slightly better day than the past several, with occasional patches of sunshine, no rain, but a strong cold wind. Of the 18 wineries in the immediate area with tasting rooms (not counting another dozen or so in nearby El Dorado County), we picked three that were close by, open on a Wednesday (some are only open weekends), and which appeared to specialize in old-vine zinfandels. Montevina was first, and largest. We tried about six reds (mostly Italian varietals), plus an interesting Orange Muscat desert wine. Only two stood out as special: the 1994 Montanaro is an 80% Barbera 20% zinfandel blend, with a luscious fruity nose, fairly light bodied but with a complex taste we really liked. At a $5.99 closeout price, it was a tremendous bargain, and we bought three bottles. I'd have bought a case if we had any place to store it; the 1995 Tera d'Oro Zinfandel is one of their premium "reserve" wines, and is all from one small vineyard planted in 1926 (I forget the name). It was a wonderful "big" well-balanced zin. Even though somewhat pricey at $20, we splurged on three bottles.
Moving on to Karly. The only wine that impressed us was their 1996 reserve "Sadie Upton" zinfandel, all from vines planted in 1926. We bought only one bottle - having already used up our limited wine cellar space. The proprietor is an interesting character - having been a fighter pilot and then a stunt pilot before settling down to make wine. The tasting room is decorated with photos and memorabilia from his earlier lives.
We finished up at Dobra Zemlja Winery - by far the smallest of the three. We didn't think much of the wine, but had an interesting conversation with Dobra and his wife. He has a lovely accent and huge mustache, matching his name. Like the other wineries in this area, they are constantly fighting deer, who like the tender young wine shoots, and seem to be able to go over or under almost any fence. But they also have a new threat - large flocks of turkeys which fly in and feast on the grapes just before they are ready to harvest.
5/14 We drove highway 50 over the Sierra Nevada, passing through South Lake Tahoe, where we were treated to nice views of the lake. There's still plenty of snow at the summit, although the road was clear and dry. Continuing east on U.S. 50, we stopped for the night about 20 miles east of Fallon at Sand Mountain Recreation Area - a free BLM campground adjacent to a spectacular sand dune, which rises out of the desert with no warning and no apparent reason. It's a pretty spot, but I wouldn't recommend it to most RVers, since it is primarily a playground for dune buggies, and we had to listen to a dozen or so of them buzzing up and down the dune.
5/15 Highway 50 was closed east of us - apparently a huge washout at Austin Summit - so we had to backtrack 20 miles to Fallon, then head north up to Interstate 80, which we had hoped to avoid. East of Wells, the highway passes through many miles of desolate alkaline mud flats, with absolutely no vegetation. The light colored soil, often crusted with white salts, is peppered liberally with fist-sized black rocks. The highway was lined with a drainage ditch on both sides. The slope of the ditch facing the road had a novel form of graffiti, extending along the road for several miles. The local kids had collected the black rocks and used them to spell out their names or initials, and record their current love affairs, on the slope of the ditch, a new, and literal form of "lithography".
We stopped for the night at Mountain Shadow RV Park in Wells. This is a small, but neat, well-maintained, park. It's a Good Sam park, with high ratings in the TL guide, which, for a change, we felt were justified. It's modem-friendly. It's fortunate that we enjoy the sound of trains - the main line was about 100 yards away, and quite busy.
5/16 Driving out of Wells, we passed a big truck stop. Our CB was on channel 19, the truckers channel, and we were treated to a sultry female voice, reading a long advertisement - a tactfully worded description of the services available to truckers at the local whorehouse. Nevada is indeed different!
We arrived at Great Basin National Park in mid-afternoon, and found a nice big site with tremendous views in Lower Lehman Creek Campground. This campground has 11 well-space sites, most of which can accommodate large rigs, and about half of which are pull-throughs. Later, we checked the other two campgrounds in the park, and they are less RV-friendly. Each has just a few sites which could hold a big rig, and no pull-through sites. By late evening (on a Saturday night), all but one site was filled in our campground. The campground is at 7200 feet, and the evening was chilly.
5/17 We spent the morning taking a 90-minute tour of Lehman Cave. This is one of the best-decorated caves in the country, with extensive and beautiful stalactites, draperies, shield formations, etc. In the afternoon, we took a hike up Lehman Creek, enjoying the early spring flowers. This week's color is yellow. The trail was fringed with big glossy buttercups, patches of yellow violets, and a yellow-flowered mahonia bush, which creeps along the ground never more than about 6 inches high. Signs of the local gold rush are still visible. The trail crosses an old aqueduct, dug down the mountain to take water to a placer mining site a few miles north. The aspen trees are just leafing out. The predominant trees around our campground are pinon pines and junipers, both growing only about 15 feet high, but also getting almost 15 feet wide. Higher up the mountain, these gave way to extensive stands of mountain mahogany - also about 15 feet high. We probably won't be able to get up to the bristlecone pine forest - which starts at about 10,000 feet. The ranger said that there is still 8 feet of snow up there.
5/18 Lexington Arch is a huge natural stone arch, set high on a mountainside. While the arch is an impressive sight, the real object of the strenuous hike up to it is not the arch, but rather the hike itself and the spectacular view of mountains and valley. The hike begins at the end of a long twisting jeep trail labeled "high clearance vehicles only". Although the trail to the arches is only 3 miles round trip, it climbs continuously, gaining a lot of altitude, making it a good physical workout. During this hike, as well as yesterday's hike, we were wondering how we had gotten so badly out of condition - we were feeling tired and out of breath very early. It finally dawned on us that the problem was simply the high altitude. We're camped at 7500 feet. Most of the trails start around 8000 feet, and go up from there.
This has been a cool, wet spring, and snow levels are still a problem. The last half of the Lexington Arch Trail (one of the lower trails in the park) still disappeared into deep snowdrifts on the forested north-facing slopes, making hiking difficult. Dave pushed on through the snow and made it up to the Arch, which was on a sunny south-facing slope, and snow free. The view to the east out over the valley was spectacular. The trail went through a wide variety of terrain - beginning along a stream in an aspen grove, moving up through open slopes of sagebrush, then into a narrow valley heavily forested with pinon pine and mountain mahogany, gradually changing to spruce and pine as we climbed. We saw mule deer grazing close to the trail, and Helen identified several new spring flowers along the way.
5/19 We're leaving this morning, disappointed that we couldn't get to the ancient bristlecone pine forest because of the heavy snow. Someday, we'll be back.
5/20 A long day's drive through desolate high desert basins, over small mountain ranges, and then more basins. Most of the basins had areas near the center where the land was salt-encrusted and hardly anything grew. A couple of these basins had islands of irrigated farmland, where the typical crop was hay or alfalfa. We spent the night at Butch Cassidy Campground - near the intersection of US 50 and I 70. The campground is modem-tolerant (I can't really say friendly - the manager had been stung by an RVer whose "quick call" turned out to be 20 minutes - on the line which the office uses to process VISA charges. The manager was understandably reluctant, but agreed after some assurances).
5/21 Helen spent the entire morning struggling with the laundry. After starting many loads, she discovered most of the washers weren't working quite right and that only one dryer worked - the others were being converted to gas and waiting for hookups. Dave caught up on paperwork (mostly computerwork - there's very little paper anymore), did some route and schedule planning for June, when our daughter will fly out to spend 10 days with us, did grocery shopping for a week or more of very rural (no supermarkets) camping, and topped off the fuel tank in the truck.
Fortunately, our day's drive was short - we didn't get underway until 3:00 p.m. The trip was an hour and a half of scenic driving , some of it climbing up and over an 8000-foot plateau. We're still surprised at how one-dimensional the plant community is in the high desert, compared to, for example, the Sonoran desert further south. We drive through miles of nothing but sagebrush and bunch grass. Occasionally, we climbed a little and drove through miles of a "forest" of stunted pinon pine or Utah Juniper on the mountain slopes.
Just a few miles from the entrance to Capitol Reef National Park, Thousand Lakes RV Park is a delightful place - well back from the highway, spacious, with a backdrop of huge red sandstone cliffs close to the north and distant mountain views in all other directions. The sites are large, and angled so that the view of the cliffs is not obstructed by adjacent RV's. Our site is 40' wide and 55' long. For really long rigs, there are also some 65' x 30' sites. Every night there is a moderately-priced "chuck wagon dinner" prepared in the pavilion. The ribeye steaks and barbecued chicken are both delicious. Each morning, Valley Reilly makes six kinds of muffins, for those who order them the night before.
Although the campground is only half full when we pull in, we'll only be able to stay on our site for two nights. Beginning Friday night (Memorial Day weekend), the park is entirely full with advance reservations. Two days isn't enough to see the Park. We found that the campground in the National Park was already full, and the other commercial campgrounds would also be full. There are a number of Forest Service campgrounds within 20 miles or so, but most have very short length limitations. We discovered some nice boondock possibilities by driving jeep trails into BLM land nearby.
We then decided to stay right here at Thousand Lakes, moving to their large overflow area to dry camp (another synonym for "boondock" - meaning no water, electric, or sewer hookups) for the busy weekend. Those who've been following our travels for a while are aware that we can be quite comfortably self-sufficient for up to a week (the major sacrifice being that we give up on long hot showers; we can't run the air conditioner either - but we try to avoid really hot weather, moving north as needed). Our trailer has 40 gallons of fresh water, 40 gallons storage each for greywater (from sinks and shower) and blackwater (from toilet) storage, and a six-gallon quick-recovery hot water heater. The water heater and refrigerator can be run from either electricity, when hooked up to "shore" power, or propane, when boondocking. We have three sources of heat: a small electric "cube" heater - convenient when we have shore power; a built-in furnace, ducted to all rooms - comfortable unobtrusive home-style heat, but with fairly high consumption of electricity (a big fan) and propane; and a portable catalytic propane heater, which burns propane very cleanly, with no flame, is silent, and uses no electricity. It's 100% efficient, but does require that we keep a window cracked open to replace the oxygen it uses. We have about 20 square feet of solar panels on the roof to keep our batteries charged (if the sun shines). Our latest addition is several low-power halogen light fixtures, which give a focussed, bright, reading light at 1/2 to 1/4 of the power of our old lights.
5/22 The National Park Visitor Center at Capital Reef is small, but crammed with information - worth a long visit. Helen discovered a bin containing a description and mounted specimen for each kind of plant in the park. The complex geology of the park is well described. Today, we left early to do the long drive through Cathedral Valley. This is accessible only via 25 miles of un-maintained forest road. We intended to do a 60-mile loop - in on one forest road, back out on another. But when we started in on the first road, we immediately came to a ford, across the rain-swollen Fremont River. The river was muddy, flowing fast, 50 feet across, and we couldn't see bottom. It didn't seem like a good idea to try to drive through it. So we backtracked to the highway, and drove to the second forest road, which started after the highway crossed the river on a bridge, and went generally up Caineville Wash. Cathedral Valley is spectacular - huge fluted sandstone structures, some of which indeed look like gothic cathedrals. If you have a high-road-clearance vehicle (not necessarily 4-wheel drive), this is not to be missed.
We were a little nervous all day, watching several thunderstorms traverse the area. None hit us directly, although we got some light rain. But somewhere not too far away it was raining hard. And we had driven through numerous dry washes to get here, and so were wondering if these would be full of water when we headed back. As it turned out, there was no problem.
Although, as mentioned earlier, the high desert greenery seems to lack variety when viewed from the truck, when we walked across the desert and looked closely, we often found more variety among the small things. There was one small patch, somewhere along the walk to a gypsum sinkhole, where we saw big showy white primroses, a pale purple aster, a yellow daisy, and several other flowers we couldn't identify, all within a few yards.
When we reached the northwest corner of Cathedral Valley, we had a choice - retrace our path back south 40 miles or so to highway 24, or take an unlabeled forest road west to highway 72. It was 4 p.m., and the latter route seemed to be the fastest way back to civilization, so we decided to try it. It turned out to go up over Thousand Lake Mountain, climbing from the 5600-foot valley to around 9200 feet in just a few miles. Along the way it provided some spectacular views out over the valley. One of the switchbacks on the way up was so sharp that we almost couldn't make the turn with our long-wheelbase truck. Up on top, we found ourselves in a beautiful shallow valley, forested with spruce and aspen, with snowdrifts still extending out into the road in places. It is very early spring up here - some of the aspens had not yet leafed out.
The trail joined Forest Road 206, and from here out to highway 72 it was somewhat more level, and somewhat better maintained. Along this road, we saw several really beautiful camping opportunities - short jeep trails extending across the valley to little grassy clearings nestled against the aspen/spruce forest where the steep mountain began to rise. We carefully observed the road on the way out to highway 72, and concluded that we could indeed negotiate it comfortably (although slowly) with our 35' trailer. We may come back here for a few days in autumn. This area is just outside the National Park, part of Fish Creek National Forest, and so camping is allowed anywhere.
Arriving back at our RV Park, we discovered that our move to the overflow area was actually a blessing. The Memorial Day crowd had arrived, and the campground was a zoo. An incredible number of people are crammed in. But we had tucked our trailer into a remote corner of the overflow area, on a small hill. There are already 13 other rigs in the overflow area, but we have no near neighbors, and have a quiet evening. We are high enough to have an unobstructed view out across the valley to the snow-capped mountains in all directions.
While walking through the campground this evening, we saw the ultimate bunkhouse RV - a custom bus, German-built, with both a European and Alaska license plate. It's about 40 feet long. The front half looks like a tour bus, and has 20 passenger seats. The back half has sleeping accommodations for all 20 passengers, on three decks, each deck with a row of small windows. Part of the huge storage area underneath the front half opens out into an outdoor kitchen. The cook stove is sized to accommodate huge restaurant-style pots, allowing the cook to prepare a meal for all 20 passengers (plus, we assume, driver, cook, and tour director). The passengers were all German-speaking. The curb side of the back half opened out into a huge canvas-sided "slideout". We were told that this rig has no bathroom, so that like a tour bus, they are dependent on regular stops at places with bathroom facilities. The bunkhouse area looked incredibly cramped for 23 people. The campground owner told us that one of the German couples had come into the office and asked to rent a cabin for the night, and were almost in tears when told that all were taken.
5/24 After spending more time in the Visitor Center, then exploring the south end of the Scenic Drive, we hiked in Capitol Wash. Helen went up the Wash. Dave hiked a trail up out of the canyon, to the base of the Golden Throne, then walked up the wash later to meet her. There is graffiti from two eras - Indians from about 1300 AD had chiseled pictures of people and animals, as well as other cryptic symbols. In the late 1800's, the bottom of the wash became a road for early settlers and explorers, and another section of the canyon wall became a place for these travelers to scratch their names, and the date, into the soft sandstone. We didn't study it carefully but, the earliest date we noticed was 1883.
5/25 The transition from a sleepy, half-empty, campground last week, to an intensely crowded beehive of a place over the Memorial Day weekend, and back to sleepy today, is hard to believe. Not only was every RV site full (some doubled up two RV's to a site - presumably friends), but the central lawn area in the park was packed with tent campers, leaving only a small playground area. This playground area and the adult horseshoe pits nearby were constantly crowded . The overflow area had swelled to 16 RV's. The office and gift shop were hard to get into during morning and evening hours, although I managed to find reasonably quiet mid-day times to get in and hook up for EMail.
A Country Coach convention with about 20 motorhomes was here for the weekend, and I walked around and drooled a little. (For the Non-RVers, Country Coach makes truly luxurious coaches of several types, with every convenience known to man.) Several of them, converted from 40' Prevost busses, were probably in the half-million-dollar range, although it's hard to tell from the outside. Somehow I can't imagine why anyone would want incredibly heavy solid-walnut cabinets and Corian countertops in a vehicle that is supposed to be able to climb over mountains. It was funny to hear them leaving on Monday, each playing their favorite song on their computer-controlled electronic horns as they left the park.
This morning, we decided it was time to move on. Helen has a cold and slept late. Dave spent a lot of time trying to plan a schedule for the next two weeks (Leata is flying out to visit us about June 4, necessitating that we actually have to be at a specific place at a specific date and time). We both felt lazy, and the decision to move didn't actually get made until about noon. So we didn't actually get underway until well after 2 p.m.. Given the late start, and our National Park destination, we did a little research in the campground directories and called ahead to make a reservation (as it turns out, it wasn't needed) - there was plenty of space.
We stopped for the night at Spanish Trail RV Park, a few miles south of Moab, convenient to Arches National Park and also to the north entrance to Canyonlands National Park.
5/26 We awoke to the feeling of the trailer rocking, and the sound of wind howling. Clouds of sand and dust are periodically blowing down the, roads. The agenda for today was a drive through Arches. Many of the spectacular stone arches can be seen with short hikes (up to a mile each way) from the road - but half a dozen such hikes adds up to a lot of exercise. The road through the park climbs over a high plateau at two points, offering great panoramic view - including the La Sal Mountains to the southeast 13,000 feet high with the upper third still snow covered.
More rocks! That's sort of how it should seem - the dominant theme in all five Southern Utah National parks is rocks. But each pile of rocks is different, in very interesting ways. The foliage also seems to be different in each area, as the elevation, soil type, and rainfall all change.
The drive through the north part of Canyonlands is all on high plateau, with long views out over the canyons carved by the Green and Colorado Rivers. At Grand View Point, we look out to the junction of the two rivers - many miles away and largely inaccessible. The rivers are so deep into their canyons that we can only catch a rare glimpse of water.
Another spur road, and a mile or so of hiking, brought us up onto Upheaval Dome - one of nature's unsolved mysteries. The rock strata are broken and turned upward all around a huge crater-like hole. Several competing geological theories are still being argued, and little concrete evidence remains for any of them. One theory is that a huge bubble of salt was forced upward here, from the thick underlying salt layer far below (salt is somewhat plastic under high pressure, and is lighter than other rock). Another theory involves an unusual meteorite. Yet another involves an unusual volcanic event.
On another day, we drove down to the southeastern entrance to Canyonlands. This is another set of views out over the same canyons. From one of these points, we looked across a few miles of canyon to the lookout points where we were standing a few days ago, 130 miles away by road.
Another drive was along the Colorado River. North from SR191, a small highway stays close to the river for at least 20 miles, with towering cliffs on each side. The canyon is a National Recreation Area, and there are primitive camping areas at frequent intervals along the river. This is a favorite whitewater play area, and we saw numerous kayaks and rafts on the water.
There is also a paved road, SR 279, going south from SR191 along the river for about 15 miles. We followed this until we saw an enticing jeep trail heading up Jug Handle canyon to the west. We followed it up an increasingly steep and narrow canyon. The road conditions got steadily worse until we really began to wish we had bought the 4WD version of our truck. A shorter wheelbase vehicle would have been nice too - some of the switchbacks were right on the hairy edge of being sharper than our turning radius. But the views kept getting better, and the thought of having to back down several miles of narrow, twisty, trail, was not pleasant, so we kept going. The last mile or so was tough - with the truck tires bouncing and spinning over steep slickrock interspersed with pockets of loose sand. The limited-slip differential (boy am I glad that we ordered that option) did its job and kept both rear wheels churning away. I kept my foot on the accelerator, smelled the tires burning, and worried a lot about the vulnerable points under the truck, but somehow managed to keep moving.
Shortly after that, the trail leveled out on a relatively level plateau at the edge of Dead Horse Point State Park, then joined an improved gravel road, which took us uneventfully to SR 313 just at sunset, and then home. While returning along SR 313, we had to slow and creep through a small herd of wild horses who were nibbling the grass along the edge of the narrow road. We've had to stop several times in the last month for cattle in the road, but this is the first time it's been horses. Rain runoff from the paved roads creates a narrow strip of more succulent grass along each edge of the pavement, and without fences, the animals are likely to walk the highways looking for this concentrated food. Back at camp I inspected the tires and underside of the truck. The tire tread looks a bit chewed up, but we found no other damage.
There are hundreds of miles of other 4WD roads in the park, some of them descending from the plateau all the way down into the inner canyons. Many of these can be done only as multi-day trips, camping along the way. We've now acquired enough off-road experience to know that that our long-wheelbase 2WD truck wouldn't be quite up to the task. We were tempted to rent a jeep, toss in the camping gear, and do a two-day expedition. Maybe next time. This is the first time that we've been envious of the folks who are traveling in a motorhome, with a serious off-road 4WD vehicle towed behind..
Moab is an interesting town. In the 1950's it was briefly a boomtown when uranium was discovered and thousands of people flocked in to explore and work the mines. The mines never amounted to much, and none are now active. Now it is primarily a tourist town - with many small boutiques selling tourist merchandise, a huge list of outfitters specializing in white water rafting, mountain biking, jeep rentals, and guided trips on the many four-wheel drive roads through the mountains and desert. Moab advertises itself as the "mountain bike capital of the world". Indeed, we saw bikes everywhere, and there are trails into the backcountry that are designed especially for bikes. Thanks to a recommendation by the Hoffmeisters, we had really good meals at two restaurants - Eddie McStiff's brewpub (sort of California eclectic cuisine, very well prepared; the beer was nothing special) and The Grand Old Ranch House - a more traditional menu, with a slight specialization in German cooking. Helen enjoyed sauerbraten and I had an unusual and delicious German pork dish whose name I can't remember.
5/31 It's time to move on. Next stop, Zion National Park, followed by Bryce and Grand Canyon North Rim. For these three parks, our daughter Leata will join us for 10 days. After that, we'll head north, expecting to spend much of July in Idaho and Montana, and probably most of August in the mountains of British Columbia, snuggling up to glaciers to keep cool.