Retirement Road Trip #5: October 2020: the post-COVID/Janet's Retirement Utah Big Five Trip

 

Janet, freshly retired, relaxing by our Outdoorsy-rented survivalist 4Runner

New to retirement, we have had many discussions about how to handle our "road trip travel" from a lodging perspective.  We both grew up road-tripping to National and State Parks: Janet's family stayed in cabins whereas my family pulled a 13' Terry travel trailer up and down the west coast.  Should we buy an RV, whether that be the newly popular Sprinter Vans, or a teardrop trailer, or a larger trailer?  We found out about this relatively new site, Outdoorsy, which allows people with RVs to list them for rent, a'la AirBnB and VRBO for houses.  And we had studied up on Bureau of Land Management "boon docking" so we decided to try different modes of road-trip travel rather than commit to buying something (at a heavy investment, no less, and where do you store it, etc. etc.).

Janet was losing faith in my old 2004 4Runner to stand up to long road trips, even though I felt it was still young for a 4Runner with 190,000 miles on it, so what could be better than renting a new 4Runner and try out a roof-top tent! We found a perfect listing of one in Salt Lake City, so my old 4Runner made its last long trip going from Incline Village out to Elko, Nevada that first day.  Wildfire season in California was still very active, so the boring drive on I-80 was very hazy.  Janet still has tons of Marriott points, so we stayed the first night in one of their properties in Elko, dining at the excellent Odeh's Mediterranean Restaurant.

Tuesday, October 6, 2020: Picking up "the Survivalist Rig" in the south side of Salt Lake City, the owner who might have shown us around the truck and roof-top tent was on a business trip, so it was nothing like learning-on-the-go with all his toys.  We back tracked a bit, heading south on I-15 then west on US6 and US50 to Great Basin National Park just back over the Nevada border and camped the first night right at Sacramento Pass BLM site on US50 at 7,168 feet.  Believe me, there's nothing like figuring out how to open and set up the roof top tent and go through all his chests at a cold and windy high-mountain pass with night fast approaching--he had a satellite radio (never used) and a massive Bowie knife too.  We brought a lot of our own camping gear in two old Webvan bins so we gathered the essentials and made dinner.

Great Basin is an official dark skies park, and that first night's views were incredible, that is until moonrise.  We were warm and cozy inside, but getting up in the middle of the night involved sitting at the top of the ladder, finding shoes to wear to walk to the pit toilet, then descending the dew-slicked ladder then reversing the process to climb back in our down bags.  It's a good thing we are still spry!

Wednesday, Oct 7: Setting up and tearing down this roof top tent is definitely a younger man's game.  This Tepui tent (since absorbed by Thule) is a "soft-shell" tent with a rainfly (that flaps rather loudly in windy conditions), and a heavy waterproof cover than needs to be completely zipped around the perimeter of the folded tent.  You zip off the cover, let it fall to the side of the truck (one side is attached), then bring it back over the folded tent and zip up the three other sides to set out for the day.  I found out quickly it was easier for me to lay on my belly on the top and pivot to follow the zipper around rather than doing it from the ground.

We also studied up on the First Come First Served campgrounds in a lot of the National and State Parks, and BLM land (as the Sacramento Pass area had 12 sites and a pit toilet), so we moved inside Great Basin and scored a FCFS site at the Baker Creek Campground at the end of a three-mile dirt road.  One "secures" a FCFS site by placing some camp chairs or other "camping items" in the site, which effectively reserves the site, and people seem to respect that, however some lame people do by putting a single water bottle on the table to reserve a site.  Since our tent comes along with us if we want to go anywhere, we used the "camp chair method" to hold the site at 10am.

The inaugural unveiling of the Tepui at Sacramento Pass BLM, NV

Janet, submitting her retirement paperwork using the Great Basin Visitors' Center WiFi

We drove to the Great Basin Visitors' Center, which was closed by the pandemic, but the WiFi still worked, then up the road to the Wheeler Peak trailhead, where we hiked the Bristlecone Forest Trail.  I looked up the Wheeler Peak Road climb on PJAMM, the cycling climbs site, after seeing some cyclists on the road up there, and its stats are impressive: at a length of 15.9 miles, you climb 4,882 feet with an average gradient of 5.8%, climbing from 5,320 feet up to 10,167 feet at the Bristlecone Trailhead parking lot.

Showing some ancient bristlecone love

That's Wheeler Peak out there at 13,000+ feet

We found a large clearing by the campground so we got in some quality Dark Skies and Milky Way time before retiring for the night.

Thursday, October 8: To celebrate Janet's Official Retirement Date, we headed south on US93 out of Great Basin, then west on NV319/UT56/UT18 to St. George, UT, where Janet found the FedEx store to officially send her Cisco laptop on its way back to Tasman Way. Employment, DONE!  We had lunch at Habit Burger then drove to Springdale, UT, to start the Zion NP part of the trip.  The stretch from I-15 to Springdale is quite commercialized, something you don't think about just on the outskirts of one of the most visited National Parks...oops, did I just say "most visited?"  Well, no wonder it's been strip malled and hotel/motel'ed to death...

And here we were hit with the first ugly reality of the trip: we thought, mid-October, it's Blue Hair Time.  Uh, wrong!  We checked in at the Springhill Suites (thanks to Marriott points, we were splitting time between the roof-top tent and a hotel room), then drove in to Zion.  We barely found a parking space in the massive Visitors' Center lot, then were greeted to a mass of humanity in the plaza and the word that all shuttles were sold out for the day.  The main canyon road is closed to all but NPS shuttles and people with Zion Lodge reservations, so Janet got her Zion stamp and we drove out through the East Entrance Tunnel then back to St. George after taking some snaps on some turnouts as any possibility of parking to hike was nil.  So crowded...damn, this is mod-October, ain't all these kids supposed to be in school??  

Would you believe this shot is from the parking lot of our hotel in Springdale?

As most of the Utah Big 5 were crowded on our supposedly "Blue Hair Time" trip, many people were breaking out of their pandemic isolation and "just getting out" combined with a "Mormon mid-October Let's Everybody Go to Our National Parks" week, places were packed.  Great Basin: not too bad, but the Lehman Caves were closed because of COVID.  Zion, a mob scene.  Where to go next?

Friday, October 9: Where to go next? Well, I'll tell you...Cedar Breaks National Monument, north of Zion on I-15 a bit...wow, another stunning landscape, as Cedar Breaks is a three-mile wide amphitheater of limestone, shale and sandstone, featuring hundreds of hoodoos much like Bryce Canyon to the east, all at over 10,000 feet. 

Bryce Canyon?  No, it's Cedar Breaks National Monument

A panorama fits nicely here of the rim of Cedar Breaks

After hiking along the Rim Trail, we made our way to Bryce Canyon via UT143/US93/UT12 to the Red Canyon Visitors' Center on the way in to Bryce.  The rangers there suggested we try the FCFS King Creek BLM Campground about 13 miles off UT12 at the end of a dirt road just up from Tropic Reservoir in the Dixie National Forest.

Heres a tip: stop at a Ranger Station or a BLM Office to get inside information on camping/boondocking in the area; recreation.gov is just crap, and bots quickly scoop up legit campground spots the instant they become available.

The campsite was fairly full, with a mix of car campers up to massive generator-fed trailers and RVs.  Good thing is that campgrounds usually have a generator cut-off time, normally 10pm.  We had a large family with a massive "fifth wheel" trailer (for mom and dad) and a large tent for the kids.  His family was a Global-Warming Stimulator on their own as they ran the generator, then had a large fire in the fire pit, then cooked meat on a briquette BBQ.

As I remember, this campsite had camp managers living in an RV at the site, and a couple of flush toilets with running water, which is a class above our Sacramento Pass BLM site.  We had a couple of conversations with a nice young woman car camping on her own in the site next to us, but it was funny when she DROVE her car over to the bathroom (about 50 meters away).

Saturday, October 10: As I've said, we have the rooftop tent so if you want to go anywhere, you need to stow the tent and leave some things in the site to keep it "reserved."  We wanted to get a reasonably early start at Bryce after seeing the masses at Zion, but in my haste to zip the cover on, I jammed the zipper in the lighter fabric of the tent, and for the life of me, I could not get it unstuck.  What was taking us about 30 minutes to "break camp" dragged into its second hour.  Fishing through the all the Survivalist Tools in his truck, Janet found a Leatherman multitool and I finally got a good enough grip on the lighter fabric to get the zipper pull free and continue the job: elapsed time: 1:45!  Boy Howdy, was I careful and slow zipping the cover on after that!

Because of our slow start, Janet had a long line to contend with to get her National Park stamp at the Visitors' Center.  We drove to the end of UT63 which skirts the west side of the canyon, stopping to get a short hike in at Rainbow Point down to the Below the Rim Trail, then worked our way back, stopping at the various overlooks heading back north to the Visitors' Center.  You can backpack the 23 miles of the Below the Rim Trail that features 4 campsites, but is by permit only.

The Hoodoos from Rainbow Point

Bryce Natural Bridge

We parked back at the more popular rim sites by the Visitors' Center and hiked along the rim to Bryce Point, then we took the long drive back to Springdale for a repeat visit to the Springdale Suites.  We had an excellent dinner at the Thunderbird Lodge in Mt. Carmel Junction, sampling their excellent pies and having my first Polygamy Porters from Wasatch Brewery in SLC.  Who knows what the Elders think of that???

Sunday, October 11: It worked out well to spend a day or two boon docking then getting a hotel for a shower and a real bed.  Back at Zion, we decided to drive up the West Rim Road which turned out to be absolutely beautiful in its own right while getting a view of the some of the features in the Canyon itself.

Lunchtime up on the West Rim Road

We spent the whole day poking along the West Rim overlooks, then gave up waiting the hour-plus at a couple of the restaurants near the hotel, but we did find a "sports bar" and had a decent dinner.  I am not sure which time it was in Springdale, but we popped in to a decent grocery store near the hotel to stock up the cooler.  I went looking for a bottle of champagne, as we wanted to toast Janet's retirement properly, and I could find nothing of the sort.  There were lots of beers, but all the craft beers featured had ABVs of precisely 5.0%, when I know many craft beers have 6-8%.  I finally tracked down a worker who kind of chuckled at me and said, by law, grocery stores can sell nothing over 5% ABV, which knocks them out of the wine and booze game.  And it was interesting that all the craft breweries have to brew a special 5% ABV version for Utah grocery stores.  I wasn't that desperate to find an official state liquor store, and it was Sunday anyways.

Monday, October 12:  The North Rim of the Grand Canyon closes for the winter in mid-October, so we planned to catch the last week for (hopefully) less people.  We backtracked to Mt. Carmel Junction and headed south on US89/89A and scored a car-camping site at the FCFS DeMott Campground, space #29.  There was an RV-only campground, but we figured they'd have their generators going and a car (make that a SUV) only campground would be quieter.

In a previous life, I came in to the North Rim at this same time of year and I was amazed at mile-after-mile of aspen forest, all changing colors to gold, orange, and red.  Spectacular.  This time, several recent fires (the Dragon Complex Fire in 2005, the Warm Fire in 2006, the Galahad Fire in 2014, and the Fuller Fire in 2016) resulted in a much more stark drive than I remember.  Closer to the rim the forests were lush, but the extensive wildfires across the west made the Grand Canyon rather hazy.

Tonight, my special cast-iron steak was on the menu, and everyone in adjacent campsites were checking out what we were up to.  When camping, I bring a 12" cast iron pan and slowly caramelize an onion, getting the first level of aroma going through the camp.  Once the onions are good and ready, I remove them and turn up the heat to cook the steak.  4-5 minutes on each side does the trick, then I warm the onions back up on the steak after I turn it.  It's a perfect camp dinner, and everyone in the surrounding sites agreed!

Sunset that first night with bellies full of steak

Tuesday, October 13: We drove back out to the North Rim and spent the day hiking along the various trails and lookout points along the rim like Cape Royal.  As we were heading back to DeMott Campground, we came up on several cars parked just off the road, and after joining them, we saw several bison lazily grazing just off the other side of the road.  We climbed up on the rooftop tent for a grand view of the small herd, and this one potential Vidiot (video idiot, aka Touron aka Tourist-Moron--the best soc-media accounts such as "Tourons of Yellowstone") asked if it was a good idea to cross the road to get closer to them.  uhhh, NOPE!  After enjoying our first view of bison in the wild, we saw a second herd a few more miles down the road, this group farther away in a large grassy meadow.

Note: I'm having trouble getting videos off my Mac in to Google's blogger tool, despite the fact the 30 second video of the bison munching along is in my Google Photos album...ugh...technology and stuff!

Tuesday, October 14: Today, we began working our way north and east, heading back to Utah and Moab.  We got our first view of the spectacular Vermillion Cliffs to the north of US89A and we saw several of the captive-bred condors hanging around the Navajo Bridge spanning the Colorado River.  We then stopped at the cheesy, touristy Horseshoe Bend overlook, where they charge you $30 to park, then you follow a crowded, broad paved path out to the overlook which is again crowded...how you say it?  Overtouristed.

We then took AZ98 to US160 to US163 at Kayenta and headed in to the Navajo Nation.  We had just been informed earlier while on the trip that our reservations at Monument Valley were cancelled because of the extreme impact of COVID on their nation, but we thought we'd be able to drive around out there and get some quality snaps.  No such luck, as the Navajo Nation had barred the road at US163 so you couldn't even take a peek.

Bummed, we kept heading northeast on US163, crossing the San Juan River at Mexican Hat.  We had thoughts of boon docking at Mexican Hat Rock, but the one site was occupied, so, luckily, I had read a sidebar in AAA Magazine about Valley of the Gods, a 17 mile dirt loop where we might be able to camp.  As it was getting dark, we were in a bit of a hurry to get set up, so we entered on the west end and parked at the first site that looked previously used.  The rules for BLM camping is you need to be a ways off any main road (something like a quarter mile or so),  and set up camp in a spot that had been previously occupied--essentially don't go off and "make a new campsite" but use one already there.  We heated up some dinner and went to sleep not really knowing what we had stumbled upon, but it was so dark and remote that we had great Milky Way viewing and star gazing.

Wednesday, October 15: We woke up, broke camp, and started driving clockwise on the loop we had only started last evening.  We finally could see the landscape as we slowly made our way along the loop.  It was like every geologic highlight of the desert Southwest was dropped in to this one valley.  Towering red rock cliffs, peppered with hoodoos, massive sandstone mittens and other formations rising up from the desert floor--features like Lady in the Bathtub, Battleship Rock, Rooster Butte, Seven Sailors and Setting Hen Butte.  All spectacular features and formations to either side of this 17 mile dirt loop.  We saw some dozen or so other boondockers, so the word is sort of out.  Stumbing upon this, literally (nearly) in the dark, was the highlight of this trip.

This Panorama shot of the Valley of the Gods barely gives the scenery justice!

After finishing the loop, we doubled back to UT261 for the climb up to Bear's Ears and Natural Bridges National Monuments.  UT261 dissolves in to a steep dirt road via switchbacks (one view there is labeled "Moki Dugway" on the map) up from the valley up to the Bear's Ears plateau. Evidently Trump 1.0 reduced the size of the Bear's Ears NM, which later Biden restored to its original scale; we can only hope Trump 2.0 forgets what 1.0 did and keeps it whole as the landscape throughout the length UT95 is spectacular, as we found out on Utah Big Five 2.0.

After backtracking west from the UT261/UT95 T,  we hiked out to the main arch at Natural Bridges NM, then went east and north on UT95/US191 up to the mess that turned out to be Moab.

We assumed, from the veritable plethora of new hotels seen coming in to town, that Moab has embarked on an aggressive infrastructure project to upgrade the main (and only) road through town (and over the Colorado River that effectively splits the town in two and forces everyone to take the one and only road to get from one side of town to the other.)  We checked in to an absolutely packed Springhill Suites on the north side of the river (which is important), which had the mass Mormon families running around from the pool through the lobby and back.  Remember, I said it was this "Mormon Week"...well it was in full flower here in Moab.  "Oh boy, we thought, we need to get out EARLY tomorrow!"

Our Springhill Suites sat in a little cluster of corporate hotels on the NORTH side of the Colorado, and any restaurants were in the old downtown on the SOUTH side of river...an important fact.  When we settled in and felt like dinner, we got in the truck and with all the road construction laying new sewer lines the length of the only access road, it LITERALLY took us 45 minutes to crawl the mile across the bridge to the old town.  Arches and Canyonlands National Parks are both north, and that flood of traffic coming down those sites and the local hotel traffic funneling down to a one-lane dirt road made for horrendous delays.  We literally could've walked there faster, but once we shoehorned ourselves from the hotel lot in to the flow, such as it was, there was no simple turn around and go back possible.

As I remember we waited a while to get a table at the Thai restaurant, and still being sort-of-pandemic and all, restaurant help was in short supply.  Food was good...Yay!

Thursday, October 16: Our early start (8am) turned out to be not early enough!  We sat in traffic from the turnoff from the highway all the way in to Arches.  By the time we made our way to the Delicate Arch parking lot, it was closed by the ranger, and the Double Arch was similarly closed, so we made our way out to the end of the road and Devil's Garden where we finally found a single spot and headed out for a hike.  The trail turned out to be rather poorly marked, and we got a bit lost.  We came to a tight slot where we saw another two hikers making their way down to what looked like the main trail, so we started heading down that same way.  There was some bouldering heading down, and we came to an area near the bottom that required me to bring up some (very) old rock climbing skills.  "Three point of contact always" i told Janet as she put her hands on one side of the slot and her feet on the other, then crept sidestepping (and "side handing") through the steep slot.  

Yes, we did find out it was "difficult hiking" in the Devil's Garden

Earlier, overheard on the trail: a 12-14 year old boy whining "I'm COLD!" and his mother's reply, "If I can do it, YOU CAN!"

It was definitely a "Jellystone-level experience" at Arches.  More ugly traffic getting back to the hotel.

Thursday, October 17th: heading out early, were able to score campsite #1 at the FCFS Horsethief Campground on the road in to Canyonlands, then we sat (I timed it) for 95 minutes in a huge conga line to get up to the Ranger kiosk at Canyonlands Island in the Sky district.  Janet, on a mission, bailed early from sitting in line in the truck once she saw the Visitors' Center in the near distance and walked there before I got through the kiosk to get her NPS Canyonlands stamp in our book.  We had passed the turnoff for the Needles district on our way north, but judged it too far inland from the main road to bother.  Boy, were we wrong!

The Island in the Sky district was crowded and when we finally got around to visiting the Needles district on Utah Big Five 2.0, we were blown away by its beauty and hiking.  There is not much hiking available in the Island district, as you are up on a plateau and looking at the geologic features carved by the Colorado below--don't get us wrong, it was still fantastic, but the crowds took something away from the experience.

Canyonlands Islands in the Sky, looking down at the Colorado meandering along

The crowds were not too bad at the overlooks once we navigated the 95 minute line to access the park, and we spent the day bouncing around the various overlooks.  We had some amusement when a dude, we found out from his somewhat amused wife was on his inaugural trip with his new RV, got stuck trying to whip a sharp left rather than go in to an overlook.  He got hung up on some rocks and vegetation trying to cut the corner and christened his shiny new RV with some body damage.  Hmmm...all that panic RV buying during the pandemic makes for good deals a couple of years down the road.

We bought a nice big steak and repeated our cast iron skillet steak, this time adding 'shrooms and spinach to the carmelized onions and had a lovely dinner watching a spectacular sunset off to the west.

Friday, October 18th: We packed up and headed north on US191 to I-70, headed west a bit, then took a left on UT24 and stopped in for lunch at Duke's in Hanksville, UT.  Janet was a little confused by the name, and even dropping the hint of the full-sized cardboard cutout of John Wayne, so was still confused until I told her "The Duke" was John Wayne's nickname!

We rolled in to Capitol Reef later in the afternoon, stopping by the petroglyphs just east of Fruita, then cruised through the temporary Visitors' Center set up in a mobile home, as the actual center was closed.   We then ventured south from Fruita on a long dirt road to its end, and did some hiking from the parking lot there.  We popped back up to Fruita and scored a site at a small BLM area between Fruita and Torrey (that's the site where Janet is lounging in the Golden Hour at the top of this page.)

Saturday, October 19th: We packed up early, as this was the day we were returning the truck to SLC, so we grabbed a decent breakfast at the Capitol Reef Inn and Cafe, and dining with a large group of cyclists on the Lizard Heads Cycling Tour (ooof, it was cold there to be riding), we heard the universal spousal refrain, "what are you doing?" and response, "Just waiting for you."

We took the long way around, heading south on the Boulder Scenic Byway (UT12) from Torrey through Boulder and Escalante then west to Panguitch, picking up US89 north with a jog over to I-15 and north to SLC.  We dropped the Survivalist 4Runner back off and snagged dinner at a south SLC strip mall.  We were kind of sweating the mileage, as his listing also charged mileage over a certain amount per day, but we found him home when we returned and he waved off any mileage as he "changed his mind on adding a mileage up-charge."

Mileage put on the Survivalist 4Runner: 2,934 miles of continuously mind-boggling scenery, despite the crowding in some locations.  But we loved it so much we immediately planned out Utah Big Five 2.0, which we largely followed the same routing, but we rented an Outdoorsy.com teardrop trailer from a gent in Reno and routed from there through southern Nevada then in to the Big Five in October 2022.  And, shortly after this trip, I sold my beloved 2004 4Runner and bought a 2021 4Runner.

And, to sum it all up:

• Seven National Parks:
• Bryce Canyon
• Zion
• Grand Canyon (North Rim)
• Great Basin
• Canyonlands (Island in the Sky district)
• Capitol Reef
• Arches
• Three National Monuments:
• Escalante Staircase/Bears Ears
• Cedar Breaks
• Natural Bridges
• Red Canyon of the Dixie National Forest

A Bighorn Sheep, which we were told was a rare sighting, 

about 50 meters from us as we finished a hike to an arch in Capitol Reef