My Trails

Mice!

Sometimes you get a feeling you should check something. I pulled apart Minnie’s air breather and took out the air filter to find it had been chewed by a rodent. I’m not sure how long Minnie’s engine has been suckling dust through the hole, but it gave me a new perspective on keeping an eye on the engine for invaders. I usually like to sit outside and watch the woodland creatures playing and scurrying around, but when I saw a small chipmunk approaching my van the other day, I picked up a stone and threw it at him.

I left Nevada on Monday and traveled east on US 50. There was hardly any traffic except for a small section where Rt. 50 joined Interstate 15 for a few miles. I like driving the back roads where you can get away from all the traffic and 80 mph speed limits, but the roads are narrower and oncoming vehicles make me flinch with the possibility of distracted drivers.

I spent the night in the Fishlake National Forest a few miles east of Salina, UT. The next day I explored up a road called Gooseberry Canyon and found many camping spots at cooler high elevation. It made me disgusted to see many trailers parked in nice campsites holding spots for weekend campers. You could tell some of them had been there for a long time, like their own private summer home in the mountains. I don’t know why the forest service allows this.

Rock climbers paradise.

The next day I drove I 70 to just outside Moab, UT and turned up Rt. 128. The road follows the Upper Colorado River through a beautiful scenic gorge with many campgrounds scattered along the river. As I drove the narrow, winding road, hundreds of people in bright yellow rubber rafts floated by on the river. It must be a thriving business. Most of the traffic was vans pulling trailers filled with rubber boats or returning empty to retrieve them.

I was not looking for a pay campsite that had triple digit temperatures like these along the river so I turned up a road into the Manti-la Sal National Forest. On my map I noticed a road that made a big circle up into the forest and I was hoping to find a good campsite.

Out the windshield I could see ahead of me a majestic mountain range that looked like there might be all my qualifications for a good place to stay. It would be high enough to be cool during the day, I might get a cell signal being this close to Moab, there should be roads to explore on Honda, and best of all, be free.

The road up into the mountains was steep and twisty. Honda would have liked it but Minnie did not. I was relieved after 10 miles and several thousands of feet in elevation gain to come upon a campground called Mason Draw. The campground was small, made mostly for people with tents, but it was priced right – $2.50 with senior pass – so I resolved to stay a couple nights. The only spot that was open to the sky for my dish and solar had a sloped driveway that made getting Minnie level impossible. I put down all the boards I had to ramp up the front end but still couldn’t get anywhere near level. I felt like I was living in the crooked little house on the crooked little hill.

The next morning I took Honda on an exploration. The road up into the forest loops over the top and continues down through a beautiful gorge where it eventually comes out on the highway a ways below Moab. The road is aptly named the Loop Road. Where the road curves through the gorge, I saw a sign pointing to an area where it is famous for rock climbing. I followed a gravel road that branched off and climbed high up the mountain to another campground, but the road was too rough to think of taking Minnie up there. Eventually I found a secluded spot only a half mile from the Loop Road that had good cell signal, level parking, and was free. Even though I had paid for another day in the campground, I drove back and moved here for the weekend.

I’m here.

After spending 10 days camped in the Dixie National Forest in Utah, I packed up and headed for Great Basin National Park, located just inside the eastern border of Nevada. The Park was not far from the circular route of my summer plans this year so I decided to check it out and spend a couple days exploring the area. The weather this summer has been especially hot, and my travels landed me at Great Basin National Park in the middle of steamy July. Fortunately, there are mountains in Nevada where one can camp at such an altitude as to get some relief from the heat of summer.

Almost the entire state of Nevada lies within a land mass known as the Great Basin. It is bounded in the east by the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and on the west by the Sierra Nevada range. What little moisture that falls from summer storms or melts from snow that accumulates in the mountain ranges, never reaches any ocean. The rivers run to the dry desert interior where it evaporates or sinks into the ground. A small portion of the Great Basin was set aside as a National Park by Congress in 1986.

Snow!

There are two cool things to do in Great Basin National Park. The first is Lehman Cave, a cute underground cavern where visitors can sign up for an hour-long guided tour. The Ranger was very knowledgeable and I enjoyed looking at all the formations and learning of the history of early explorers to the cave.

There is also a scenic 12 mile highway up Wheeler Peak to 10,000 feet. Honda liked climbing that steep, curvy road very much. It was 50 degrees in the cave and pretty comfortable up on the mountain, so the cave tour and the mountain ride were welcome diversion from the heat.

There is a campground near the top of the mountain called Wheeler Peak. The day I rode up there – not even a weekend – every site was occupied. Many visitors were seeking the cooler temperature of the high mountain.

I stayed two nights in the lower park campground called Baker Creek. Even though the Baker Creek campground was at 7700′, it was still hot during the day. When it would become uncomfortable in camp I would jump on Honda and explore the area. I found a few boondocking sites along Rt. 50 but nothing had any cell service. It is such a remote National Park – 70 miles from the nearest decent town and nowhere even close to an Interstate – that cell towers are few and far between.

On Friday I moved to a campground in the Humboldt National Forest, twenty miles north of Ely, NV. It is a nice campground but the road in was very rough and there is no cell signal. I will stay here until Monday and then head back into Utah. As I cross Utah on my way to Colorado, I hope to find a couple cool places to camp.

Donna

My sister Donna drove her motorhome to Flagstaff a few days ago and camped three days with me in the Coconino National Forest. While she was there we rode on Honda up to Lowell Observatory and took a guided tour of the restored original telescope. It was quite interesting but we both agreed the tour guide was a little too talkative. He told us detailed history of the Lowell family way back to the 1600’s. He also talked way to much about how the observatory was run on donations, and how much he would appreciate it if we could leave some money in the box on our way out. We figured the price we paid for admission was a little high and we had donated enough. We didn’t stay too long because we were both hungry and we worried that Hanna would be hot in Donna’s motorhome.

We stopped at Wendy’s for a baked potato and then headed back to our camp. It was still cool in Donna’s motorhome so Hanna was fine.

North Rim overlook

On Sunday we drove to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, stopping briefly at Marble Canyon and waving hello to the Vermillion Cliffs as we drove by. The temperature through there was brutal so we made tracks to the high country of the North Kaibab National Forest as quick as we could.

The worst part of the drive was the wind. I would never intentionally drive in wind as bad as we saw today. Both our rigs are pretty high-profile and the gusts knocked us around all the way here. The last part of the drive was directly into the wind and I’m sure my gas mileage was cut in half. We were both exhausted by the time we found our campsite and could finally relax.

We are only a few miles from the National Park entrance so Honda will take us the rest of the way in. While we were camping in Flagstaff, we ran into a couple that I had met before in Quartzsite. They had planned to meet us here at the North Rim but so far we can’t find them. There is no cell service here.

When we arrived at our little campsite here in the Kaibab and set up camp, Donna remarked, “No wonder you don’t want to break camp and move every day. You have a lot of stuff to set up!”

She is right. After I find my parking spot I have to get out and assemble my satellite dish, wire and aim it, then carry my solar panels out and run the wires, weight everything down with rocks so they don’t blow away, hook up my propane extend-a-tank, and finally unload my motorcycle. After that I can start working on the inside. She sets out her rug and chair and is pretty much done.

We did meet up with our friends at the Canyon and they joined us for two days at our camp. Buffalo hunting season starts on Friday so it was time to get out of here and head north. Next stop Bryce Canyon National Park.

Rain port

Flagstaff has a few interesting tourist sites in and around the city. I have been to most of them on past visits but I find there are reasons to see them again. First of all, the places are fun to experience again, and secondly, I am building my trust back in Honda as I ride all over the area. And so when Richard suggested we meet up and ride to Walnut Canyon National Monument, I was happy to agree.

We decided to meet at Del Taco, have lunch, and then ride a back road the few miles to Walnut Canyon. It was only about 10 miles for me to our meeting place, but Richard and Dianna had a long trip from their home. We had a nice lunch and then headed down historic Route 66 going east out of town.

Route 66 parallels Interstate 40, and because it is not a main route anymore, understandably gets less attention from the maintenance crews. The road was very rough in places where the blacktop was broken and chipped. I was following Richard and Dianna down the highway when all of a sudden I saw them hit a particularly bad hole in the pavement. Richard’s travel mug bounced out of its holder and hit the road with a burst of liquid and flying parts. We came to a quick stop, parked along the road , and searched for several minutes for the missing lid. Richard finally located the lid up a bank and fit the damaged but usable pieces back together. We took it a little slower the rest of the way.

Walnut Canyon is a preserved site of ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. The canyon is littered with dozens of stone structures built hundreds of years ago under the natural eroded cliffs. The park service maintains a walkway down 240 steps to a circular path where visitors can see close up the places the Indians lived. It is quite interesting to imagine what it would be like to live the way they did.
The problem with 240 steps down is that they must be climbed again to return to the visitors center. The afternoon was hot and I had forgotten to bring my water bottle. We all were feeling pooped by the time we reached the top. We spent a few minutes looking at the displays in the visitors center and then rode back into town for ice cream. It rained on us briefly on our way back but it actually felt good. We skipped Rt. 66 on our return and rode the busy but smooth Interstate highway.

It was a fun afternoon. Good times!

Trash

You never know what you’ll find while out walking in the woods. The other day I discovered an abandoned, family dump area only a few hundred yards from my camp that held the remains of discarded metal parts and tin cans. A lot of the trash was remains of some broken appliance or car part, but most of it was tin cans of the beverage type with two triangular holes punctured in the top (the sight of these always takes me back to another time.)

Probably the only thing that will recycle this boat is fire, but the forest is slowly swallowing up the rest of the trash pile, covering the metal with falling needles and rusting away the once treasured life of the object, and in a few more decades nothing visible will remain. It always makes me think of the answer an archeologist gave when asked how we know so much about past civilization. That answer he gave was: “We dig through their trash.”

When we lived on the farm we had a place back in the woods where all the trash was dumped. Every few weeks we would load up the wagon with discarded cans, bottles, broken plates, and useless trash that wouldn’t burn, and carry it back to a corner of the property and toss it over a bank. In the woods the trash was mostly out of sight and definitely out of mind. It is what all farmers did and probably do today.

I am camped in the Coconino National Forest just west of Flagstaff, AZ. I have my motorcycle back now and it seems to be running fine. After all this time waiting for it to be fixed it turns out that the main problem was just a faulty ignition switch. The good news is that the repairs were all covered by the warranty. The bad new is that this long wait has interrupted my plans for the summer and caused me to rethink what I will do.

It has been quite hot here in Flagstaff this week. The temperature has climbed into the 90’s each day and I would like to find a place a few degrees cooler. I will probably limit my travels this summer to the four states connected at a common point. There are lots of places in Colorado and New Mexico I have not seen, and I’m sure I can find interesting and temperate places to camp. I had planned on doing a lot of traveling this summer, but I have changed my mind. Even though the price of fuel is low, putting gas in this motorhome can quickly eat through my budget.