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Cedar Breaks<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
Cedar Breaks is pretty awesome. It’s cold up there. The campground is closed for renovation, so I head down the hill a ways to try my luck at the National Forest campgrounds. The first two I passed were closed for the season, so I decided to disperse myself. There was a promising gravel road a few miles back from the second campground at\u00a0Panguitch Lake, so I drove down it a mile or so and pulled over by a stream:<\/p>\n
Dixie dispersed<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
WHUFU page for: Dixie dispersed<\/a><\/b><\/p>
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bad: right next to a dusty, gravel road\r<\/p>\n
good: right next to a happily burbling brook\r<\/p>\n
I am here because the campground a mile away is closed for the season, so my hope is there won't be much traffic on this road tonight.<\/p>\n<\/p>
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just me and the cow pies on Blue Spring Creek<\/div><\/div>
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Did spend the night here.<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
Really pleasant to set myself up by the creek here. The creek itself has a kind of cow-poopy feel to it, making me think I might not actually be in the National Forest after all. But I ain’t gonna swim in it and I ain’t gonna drink it, so I’ll just listen to the pretty sounds and not think about the bacteria count.<\/p>\n
Wednesday<\/a><\/h3>\n
Slept badly, but my spot turned out to be pretty nice. Total vehicles driving past in my sixteen or so hours on this little road: 1 truck and 2 OHVs.<\/p>\n
Once I got back on the highway, the campground ten miles down the road was open – aaargh! In the morning I re-read the Forest Service pages, and it was indeed flagged as open on the web site, so my bad.\u00a0I might have slept better there. Anyway, I\u00a0continue down the very long hill to\u00a0Panguitch (rhymes, they say, with “sandwich” :).
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Coming down off the mountain. Panguitch is as boring as it looks.<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
I remember\u00a0the only other time I had a meal in\u00a0Panguitch<\/strong> years ago it was exceptionally bleak and depressing. So I did not have high hopes this time. I wish I could say I was pleasantly surprised, but that would be a lie. First of all, almost any town of any size nowadays has some kind of bakery\/coffee shop, but not\u00a0Panguitch. The highest rated place open at 1 pm was 3 1\/2 stars. I went to a place call the Fish something and had over-fried fish and over-fried potatoes, and pretty good coffee.\u00a0Panguitch is a culinary disaster, possibly a cultural disaster in every way. Cool name though …<\/p>\n
Drive down the Sevier Valley<\/strong> a short ways to 12 East, one of the most scenic drives anywhere. In a very few miles you’re in the middle of the first scenic attraction,\u00a0Red Canyon<\/strong>. Its campground is closed for the season, so just power on to Bryce<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
North Campground<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
WHUFU page for: North Campground<\/a><\/b><\/p>
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The other campground at Bryce, open longer into the fall. I like this one better, more convenient to the Lodge and Visitor's Center (wifi) and right next to the Rim Trail, which is what Bryce is all about.<\/p>\n<\/p>
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cool shape 1<\/div><\/div>
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That diffused white layer is pretty much my favorite part of Bryce.<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
It’s\u00a0only\u00a02:15 in the afternoon so I have my choice of many open spots. I settle on\u00a0site 64, in the tents-only loop and with the best combination of privacy and an open feel. I walk my payment back over to the kiosk, and while I’m at it, continue to the Visitors Center, a short distance further on across the road.<\/p>\n
Thursday<\/a><\/h3>\n
Slept like crap again.\u00a0My plan is to stay at Kodachrome State Park<\/strong>, which is less than thirty miles away. According to Yelp I have literally only two choices of where to get a hot meal between here and there.\u00a0I choose Foster’s Steakhouse<\/strong>, a familiar sight on Route 12 just outside the Bryce turnoff, and it worked pretty well … except for my spazz attack.
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testing my phone after spilling coffee on it - aargh!<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
I ordered a nice club sandwich, then noticed a pecan pie in their display, so I added pie ala mode<\/em> and a to-go box for 3\/4 of the sandwich – awesome, right? Finished my pie,\u00a0concentrating on\u00a0the laptop, ns I aet my coffee down on the edge of my phone. No big deal, right? But in my spazzy mood I JUMPED! My coffee cup knocked over my water, liquids flying everywhere. I wiped the coffee\/water off my keyboard – no harm done, thank goodness. I had a $200 keyboard replacement a few years ago for spilled whiskey and my backlighting is still broken.<\/p>\n
I did the same for my phone, and the news was not quite so good. My screen is pretty badly cracked, so it has zero integrety in terms of holding water off. THe phone seemed to work, but there were weird gray streaks on the screen. Two days later when I had phone bars again I had a series of concerned messages from Martha because my ever so cute “no answer” message got thrashed!\u00a0\u00a0I am only\u00a0three weeks away from the end of my two-year bondage, and I REALLY want this poor abused phone to make it to then. [Spoiler alert: by the next day the gray streaks were gone and the phone functions as well as ever. Haven’t checked the message yet.]<\/p>\n
Somewhat rattled by this new fuck-up, I\u00a0start the short distance to Kodachrome. It is nine miles up the canyon from the little town of Henrieville<\/strong>, and there is a Grand Staircase Visitors Center<\/strong> there. A visitor said the campground was full when she left, so that’s that for\u00a0Kodachrome. I’m not even gonna drive up there just to look at more rocks. ;-\\ The information lady said there is\u00a0\u00a0some kind of State Park fan club event this weekend that has this area unusually packed (ugh :-\/). So, onward.<\/p>\n
There is a long stretch of meadow-y road west of Escalante<\/strong> called The\u00a0Blues<\/strong> which I will forever remember because I traversed it in pretty heavy snow in my little sporty Peugeot back in the 90’s. I mush have been more of a risk-taker back then, because that seems crazy to me now.<\/p>\n
I really do like Escalante. All Utah towns don’t suck! I had good times the two times I stayed here. Since I’ve become a van guy I haven’t had much occasion to stop.\u00a0After Escalante are the serious white rocks. The road follows some extra hard cap rock that is I think the Cedar Mesa Formation(*), the same stuff I will be driving over much of tomorrow, just packaged a little differently.<\/p>\n
(*)Further research says that this is actually the Navajo Formation, which I think of as red, but isn’t necessarily according to the iron content locally!
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Calf Creek<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
Anyway, it’s on both sides of the road for miles, and there is one magic stretch where the follows a very narrow ridge sloping off to canyons on both sides. The cottonwoods in the canyons are at peak color, so it’s quite dramatically pretty.
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Calf Creek Canyon looks like an awesome hike<\/div><\/div><\/p>\n
Last time I marked a place called\u00a0Calf Creek Canyon<\/strong> in my memory as a cool place. I stopped there today and it was insanely busy. Not only was the campground full, but day-use parking area was full to overflowing. I got a spot cuz someone left and explored a little while. It is mighty pretty here, too bad I can’t stay. The books say the hike up to Lower Calf Falls is beautiful. Hope I get to do it some day. A little after Calf Creek is this amazing short stretch of road on a pretty narrow ridge, where there are very scenic canyons on both sides of the road. The one on the left is the very same Calf Creek Canyon.<\/p>\n
Next landmark is the town of\u00a0Boulder<\/strong>. It’s bigger and nicer than I remembered. Foliage here is amazing. Fifty miles further up the road when I was out of the fall color and back in the gray piney mountains I thought that if I had it to do over I would have looked into renting a room and spending the afternoon enjoying the colors. Duh.<\/p>\n
Now\u00a0I am climbing the flank of massive Boulder Mountain<\/strong> (11,300′) soon back at high altitude. Goodbye cottonwoods, willows, and oaks. Hello aspen and pine. Yellow aspens leaves are quite beautiful interspersed with the pines, but their season is long gone for this year up here. The aspens are completely bare. I’ve gone\u00a0up at least 2,500′, outside temp went from 64\u00b0 to 53\u00b0 in fifteen miles. The miles of white-barked bare tree trunks do have their own austere, deathlike beauty I guess.<\/p>\n
Most of the campgrounds are closed, but one was open. It’s quite high up and I am over the heater-running-all-night thing, so I pressed on. Six miles later, the last campground before Torrey was closed also, so after contemplating for a few minutes I drove back up the hill – the steepest part of the drive, I’ll bet I gained 1000′ in those six miles. Anyway, it turned out to be pretty nice:<\/p>\n
Oak Creek Campground<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
WHUFU page for: Oak Creek Campground<\/a><\/b><\/p>
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Elevation 8,800'. Small, very handy campground in the high mountains Route 12 traverses between Boulder and Torrey. All the other campgrounds up here are closed for the season.<\/p>\n<\/p>
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Not much to report. Nestled into a spot that will get the morning sun pretty early. It was warm enough that I could do my laptop thing outside till dark, which wasn’t that much time considering how late into the day I had to search for a campground. It was quite still when I went to bed, but got quite windy in the middle of the night.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is 1.5 hours to the next civilization at Cedar City. Yelp\u00a0and my previous visits tell me the dining choices here in Caliente are kind of sucky, so I decide to leverage my civilized status\u00a0as a motel dweller and have … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-october-2017-395-and-utah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}