Heading towards central Utah…
Day 26: Tuesday, May 1, Cortez, CO to Blanding, UT
Today is the last day that we will be visiting the Anasazi culture, visiting Canyon of the Ancients National Monument and Hovenweep National Monument off Hwy 491 northwest of Cortez. This requires going off the beaten path (which appeals to our inner Lewis and Clark) and as usual, we weren’t disappointed. First of all, you should be proud of how well the National Park Service is using your tax dollars. We tend to visit the more obscure national monument sites and at everyone the visitor center/museums have been great: architecture, displays, information, etc. After visiting the monument center, we headed off the beaten path to see Lowry Pueblo. Out in the middle of the Sagebrush Plateau, there was only one other couple there. Note that the Lunch Box had to conquer a rather rough gravel road but we had no issues. The picture demonstrates that we truly were out in the middle of nowhere!
Once at the pueblo (which consists of 20 rooms and a kiva (round religious room) we were able to walk inside again. Part of the pueblo is now covered in order to protect it from the rain. Here is my travelling partner getting in touch with her inner Indian and then exiting (note how small the doors are – I was nearly on my hands and knees!
After leaving Lowery Pueblo, we headed down back roads to another part of the monument, Hovenweep. The importance of this site is that the Anasazi built towers in various shapes above the edge of the canyons. Again the workmanship was amazing, with the rocks perfectly shaped and walls smooth. No one really knows what they were used for, but the best guess is that they were granaries. You can see several of the towers in this picture.
There are two “D” shaped towers on the left, in the back center are square towers, in the lower middle are the ruins of a pueblo built under the rocks, and in the front on the right are the walls of a pueblo where we were standing. This is probably the end of the ruins as tomorrow we head back into the center of Utah and Mother Nature resumes center stage with Capitol Reef National Park on the agenda.
Day 27: Wednesday, May 2, Blanding, UT to Torrey, UT
We now have the definitive definition of “the middle of nowhere”. It’s where you can’t even get a Verizon cell phone to work. Today we spent a lot of the day “in the middle of nowhere”. Leaving Blanding, we turn west on Hwy 95 and cross the great Cedar Mesa, approximately one million acres of a reasonably flat plateau covered with dark green cedar trees and bordered on the north with great red cliffs. What we didn’t know is that the plateau is slashed by the White Canyon, a deep canyon carved over eons into the plateau that leads (in about 50 miles) to the Colorado River canyon. There is no permanent running water in the White Canyon, but over thousands of years three huge natural bridges have been formed in the canyon. Because the canyon is white rock, and the bridges are white rock, they tend to blend in with each other in a picture. See if you can find the bridges in the pictures below. First Sipapu Bridge, then Kachina Bridge.
Owachomo Bridge (below)
Leaving the Natural Bridges National Monument, we headed back west on the plateau, following along the edge of the White Canyon until we headed down into the Colorado River Canyon. The bridge across the river is at the end of Lake Powell, which is formed by the Glen Canyon Dam upriver from the Grand Canyon. The lake stretches for nearly 100 miles. Here is a picture of the river crossing at the tip of the lake. The river enters from the upper left and you can barely see the bridge. The picture is taken from high atop cliffs on the west side of the river.
We stopped to walk Augie (again) who was having a bad day. He hates going over cattle guards, and there were a number of them on the highway. It was as if he was having an anxiety attack, panting and trembling, trying to sit in the black hole under my legs. Pretty bizarre, but he came out of it when we stopped. The geology of the west side of the Colorado was dramatically different than the east. We quickly emerged from the canyon and then had what seemed like endless miles of desert with high mountains in the distance. The wind was really blowing off of thunder storms in the mountains so I was occupied with wrestling the motorhome to keep on the narrow road and the co-pilot was trying to placate the hysterical dog, so we were ALL ready to stop for the night. The wind did keep it cool, and the RV Park in Torrey was a good place to stop, especially since it does have decent wifi and cell phone coverage. We went for nearly 100 miles “in the middle of nowhere” on Hwy 95 and then Hwy 24 west to Torrey.
Day 28: Thursday, May 03, Torrey, UT
Today is a short travel day with Capitol Reef National Park on the agenda. This little known park is full of fantastic rock formations and cliffs, with lots of red rock. It is cut by the Fremont River (which is about 10’ wide, and actually has an interesting pioneer story. Out here, “in the middle of nowhere” in a canyon that’s less than a mile wide, a group of Mormons settled in the 1800’s and planted orchards, which are still in production today. They grow apples, peaches, pears, cherries and apricots along about a five mile stretch of the canyon. We visited one of the remaining houses (actually lived in until 1969) and cruised the park. The road in the park is quite narrow as the picture below illustrates. We fit through, but fortunately no one was coming from the other direction!
Yes, this is actually a curve in the road. The walls of the canyon rose so steeply above us that we couldn’t see the tops from inside the motorhome.
The most interesting thing was the surface of the ground. It was covered with shards of rock, like pottery had been shattered and scattered across the ground every where in sizes ranging from minute to several feet long.
The road turns south for us tomorrow as we head towards Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks. Hopefully Augie has gotten over his “road hysteria” and we will continue to fight the urge to steal red rocks off of government property!
Day 29: Friday, May 4, Torrey, UT to Cannonville, UT (Kodachrome Basin State Park)
Heading down Highway 12 from Torrey, UT, we traverse one of the most scenic drives in the US (says all the tourist propaganda, and they were right!). Remember that Torrey was in the heart of red rock, rugged cliffs, etc. We climb into heavily forested mountains, crossing a pass at about 9,500 feet, then dropping a bit into some very rugged country, mostly white “slick rock” cut by very deep canyons. At one point in time we traversed “Hell’s Backbone”, where the road took up ALL of the ground between two deep canyons (with no shoulder on either side). The wind was blowing, but I “maintained my lane” and we survived. Once we got to Cannonville (population about 100) we left the highway and turned south. The directions said that Kodachrome Basin State Park was 9 miles off the highway, but it seemed to take forever. The road (which WAS paved with numerous cattle guards) followed along a dry river bed through a wide canyon. We increasing got a bit nervous as there didn’t seem to be anything worthy of a state park in our future. I could tell that the co-pilot was getting ready to question my Lewis and Clark skills, but then we turned a corner and saw this. As if they were gates, these two red rock monoliths rose on either side of the road.
After we entered the “gates, we then saw this.
After passing through the first gap on the left, we saw this.
The campground is at the end of the road in a “C” shaped canyon that’s about half a mile across and surrounded by these white bluffs with red rock below. An amazing little surprise at the end of a rather undistinguished road! Of course, it is the “middle of nowhere”, meeting our new definition of no Verizon cell phone coverage. Just a great little place to stay!
Next Up: Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, and the road home…
Post a Comment