Wednesday (Oct 25)
I am facing due east, so my door is facing south and the morning sun pounding in pretty hard. I fiddle with the awning for a few minutes, then notice how cool and pleasant it is on the other side of the van … duh. Why not just punt the awning and just turn the van around instead? The story of my life with the awning in a nutshell (i.e. the times it is actually useful are really quite few). Great idea! I’m completely comfortable facing north.
About a minute after I get settled a big ole BLM truck pulls into the spot across the road and idles for a while. I was afraid some noisy activity was going to begin, but no, it was just a dude on his scheduled run to inspect andclean firepits. He was a cool guy. He moved to Moab 23 years ago, and is quite amazed at what a busy popular place it has become.
I am having a rare “coffee at home” morning. I think there’s no coffee for at least an hour in the direction I’m heading, so I crank up the stove and boil me some java. Very pleasant interlude. When I do leave, and get back to the intersection with the highway, 191 North, I see that I was wrong about the coffee. There is a brand new shopping center at the intersection. Coming in yesterday it looked to be under construction, but I did a drive-by and it turns ut to be open, with wifi and breakfast – boom!
I order a small coffee and a club sandwich. Eat the fries, take the sando to go, soak up wifi for an hour. Perfect! Thus fortified, the hour drive to Green River is a breeze!
I thought Green River was a dump when I passed through last time, and as near as I can tell it still is. I need to decide what I’m doing with myself for the next few days so I pull into the shade of one of the rare two story buildings and think it over. The thing I know I want to do is go to Mystic Hot Springs, and I want to avoid the weekend if possible. Therefore I need to be there tomorrow night, since today is Wednesday. The two option for tonight are to go to a BLM spot twelve miles up the road from here and hit the interstate tomorrow, or head south back to Hanksville and take good ole 24 west over the mountains and get there the back way. If I had more days I would take two or three days and do option #2, but I don’t, so it’s gravel road to Swasey’s Beach tonight, and interstate tomorrow.
WHUFU page for: Swasey’s Beach Campground
Twelve miles north of the town of Green River, on the Green River. A nice swimming beach, boat ramp, dramatic formations of the Book Cliffs in all directions.
tonight:
There are four sites right on the river, this is one of them! The colors of the cottonwoods are just perfect tonight.
I am having a sensory-overload, near-religious experience here. The colors are intense and the beach is a perfect white sand beach, and the buttes and mesas of the Book Cliffs are iconic western backdrop. Good choice!
The river, the sound of the river, the trees, the shadows of the trees, the sunlight in the trees, the rocks, that weird rock right across the river, the epic sunset, the short shorts, long legged woman next door, the after sunset glow where the perfect buttes are silhouetted like a Disney ride. Watch long enough to see the waxing, almost half moon take over illumination duties from the sun until there was moonshine on the river. A lifetime memory.
Thursday
Beautiful day at this blessed spot. I get phone bars in the morning! God it is hard to leave this place … but I do.
I was quite looking forward to the Green River coffee place that I remember as sort of nice but with inexplicably hostile servers. No hostility today, because they are inexplicably closed at 12:30 on a Thursday afternoon. Heck with those people. There is a Mormon-y looking restaurant a few miles back on the other side of the river, but the action seems to be at a converted gas station Mexican restaurant 200 yards back.
On the way to my failed rendezvous with the coffee shop I had noted something going on. Yelp says it’s a 5-star happenin’ event. The kitchen is a food truck. There are picnic tables between the pump islands and tables in the station building. The locals seemed to go inside and the gringo tourists seemed to stay outside (more “authentic” I’m guessing :). I am not as big fan of eating hot meals out if the wind as many people, so I joined the locals inside. My chorizo con huevos was very good, and good ole Personal Hotspot let me load my podcasts and read my news/sports sites, so it was a resounding success all around. Really, now that I am on the unlimited data plan I don’t really need to worry about wifi as much in my coffee and food planning, but old habits continue…
Long drive today. I would rather suffer the drive and hit the hot tubs on Thursday night than dawdle my way there and suffer the Friday night crowd at the hot tubs. Life is suffering :)
The stretch of I-70 from Green River to Richfield is really dramatic and really scenic and really empty. You are driving into and across something called the San Rafael Swell, which a pretty dramatic wall of rock in its edge. There are many excellent rest areas to stop and check out the rock formations. I stopped at a few, but otherwise it was straight on through to:
WHUFU page for: Mystic Hot Springs
There is one big pool with a little waterfall, then up the hill are some bathtubs for your own private soak overlooking the wide valley. Really cool setup.
Camping area is 200 yards down the hill.
The pools are spectacular and the actual camping area is pleasant but rest of the property is extremely derelict.
Walking up the crappy trail to the bathtubs in flip flops is hard for a 70-year old. It's pretty dangerous coming back down in wet flip-flops!
Electric hookups and tent/van sleeping seem to be the same price.
tonight:
Price has gone way up. Still a cool place though.
Oh, I had megafun at the tubs tonight. My messed-up wrist is a problem when I need to push off to get out of the tub, but it’s healed enough that I can manage it. I feel good about the effort to get here Thursday. There aren’t very many people here, but even so, when I first went up top where the individual tubs are, all five of the usable ones were occupied. I got lucky that a couple was leaving. They were leaving the furthest tub, the one around the corner with the spectacular view west up the valley. So if you can’t be good, at least you can be lucky!
By the time I picked my way down the slippery path to the main pools an hour or so after dark, I had the place to myself. Excellent!
Friday
Went to bed early enough, but tossed around all night and didn’t really wake up till after ten. Not happy with how I’ve been sleeping on the road. Decided not to go back up the hill for a morning soak, but did hang around and read for a while in the grass.
As usual in Utah, the food options are not exciting, but I’ve been to Big Daddy’s Deli in Richfield before and it’s as it gets around here. I got a breakfast sandwich and coffee for here and a big ole Italian sub to go, so all my needs got met at this one spot. The only alternative is a little breakfast place on the same block that is straight out of a David Lynch movie. Decor, waitress, and menu probably haven’t changed since we went to the moon.
Follow I-70 to its end at Cove Fort. Merge onto I-15 south to Beaver UT. I-15 is pretty much the border between the Colorado Plateau (all those wonderful rocks) and the good ole Basin and Range so familiar to us Nevadans.Today’s boring drive is pretty much indistinguishable from a boring east-west drive anywhere in Nevada.
I am aiming for a BLM site called Rock Corral. It appears to be a bit off the road, but the Swasey’s Beach experience was so excellent I am enthusiastic to try another one. Around the little town of Minersville there is a little BLM pulloff that appears to be a camping area not in AllStays(!) I stop and think about it for a while – the proverbial bird in the hand. But the lure of the unknown is strong, so I press on to Rock Corral. Shoulda stayed here.
WHUFU page for: Rock Corral
Ten miles of washboard-y gravel road off of Utah 121. Not worth it as it turns out. A very full open-top trash barrel in the middle of the camping area and not even a porta-potty.
Some cool big boulders at the edge of the camping area, but otherwise nothing interesting.
Update: The signs were (IMO) misleading. I am not at the official camping area. In the morning I chose not to subject the van to 10 more miles of this bumpy, dusty road, so I will probably never know what it's really like. :)
My stellar experience with going a little off road two nights ago at Green River colored my judgement here. I passed up a perfectly plausible place 15 miles ago to try this place, and it’s a FAIL. Shoulda stopped at the easy place. I do get very good phone reception for some reason, so that’s something.
After nine miles of sometimes washboard-y gravel road there is a sign at a fork that says Rtock Corral to the right, camping to the left. I take the left. A mile or so later there is a level spot tucked into the hillside with a couple of picnic tables and a trash barrel. That is evidently what they mean by “camping”.
It’s a funny little corner I’m in. Looking up at the steep hill behind me, I’m just sure there’s something very interesting right over the edge. In fact, I’m sorta convinced that the real campground is up there. Since I have great phone reception I read a couple of web pages on Rock Corral that says there are bathrooms and generally more development that I have here. Maybe it’s up there! I scrabble my way up the hill to find … more hills. But I follow the fence line on up the ridge to a spectacular few of the wide valley I’m in, and a very rough kind of road through a gate in the fence. Amazingly a couple of pickups go past while I am watching the sunset. I am kind of amazed to see them, but they do not seem to excited or surprised to see me, a random city dude, just standing around in the sagebrush and junipers looking at the valley.
There is a gibbous moon, but to be safe I head back down before it gets too dark. All in all, I had a nice hike and mini-adventure for a place that seemed so featureless and boring when I first got there.
There’s a Warriors game tonight and I’ve got great phone reception, so … I used up > 2 gigs of my “unlimited” data livestreaming the game and running Personal Assistant. So I had a pretty fun and connected night in this godforsaken spot.