Utah

Utah!  Wow!  We have seen lots of beauty in just about every state we've passed through on this trip but Utah was on a whole different level.  I had picked out a campground that was a reasonable distance from our last stop in Colorado.  Camelot Pinnacle Resort and RV Park was located just west of Duchesne (pronounced Dooshayne), Utah and had a website that described the campground as “Perfectly nestled in a majestic canyon and encircling mountains, our campground provides a spectacular setting of sheer cliffs, lush green trees and breathtaking scenery.”  Well, I never believe everything I see on a website but this description did not come close to describing the beauty of this place.  I’m taking credit for finding us some incredible places to stay on this trip, though I will admit a lot of it was luck.  Here are a few pictures of the campground and Bob’s 360 degree panoramic video.

This is the Strawberry River that passed right behind our campsite:

Approaching this campground was an adventure.  I had spoken to the owner on the phone and she told me it was 6 ½ miles off Highway 40 but that’s all she said.  The first four miles of the approach road were spectacularly beautiful and then the road became a dirt road, narrowed up and the rest of the trip was just awe-inspiring.  Bob said on the way in, “I’m going to videotape this road sitting on top of the truck” and two days later he did exactly that.  He videotaped most of the 2.5 miles but I’m just posting the shortest video to spare you J.  I am also posting a picture I took of him sitting up there when we got to the campground entrance.

One time as we were driving down this road to the campground, we saw goats lying on a ledge about 40 feet up the cliff.  Here are a couple of pictures.

If you look carefully, you can see four goats on the ledge in the picture below.

When we got to the campground, we had the whole place to ourselves.   The owner came down to greet us.  Her name was Barb too and she had a black lab named Scooter who towered over Poppy (Poppy weighs 95 pounds).  Barb told us we didn't have to put Poppy on a leash while we were there.  Between no leash and playing with Scooter, Poppy pretty much thought she was in heaven (and so did we). 

We, of course, set up the R-dome and spent our evenings sitting in it, having cocktails, dinner and watching the sun drop behind the cliffs.  During the day we visited two local reservoirs.  First we went to Starvation Reservoir (I have no idea why it’s called that).  It was about 14 miles away.  We went canoeing with Poppy and had a great time.  Canoed to a beautiful beach and let her swim after the ball for a while, then paddled across the lake and back.

 We did that in the morning, then drove into nearby Duchesne to get a few groceries and had lunch at a little Mexican restaurant with outdoor tables so we could bring Poppy with us (it was too hot to leave her in the truck).  

The next day, we went in the other direction to Strawberry Reservoir State Park which was a little further away and a little bigger than Starvation.  We brought a picnic lunch with us and stopped at the Visitors Center to get some info on where to launch our canoe.  There was a young man standing outside the Center and we started talking with him.  He was running across America (for the second time) to raise awareness of Batten disease, a rare genetic neurological brain disorder of children.  He had stayed in the park the night before and had lost his iPhone somewhere in the park.  His name is Noah Coughlin (www.battenjourney.com) and he was pushing a jogging stroller holding all his stuff.  Bob offered to drive him back through the park to try to find his phone.  I stayed at the visitors center because there isn't room for three people in the truck.    I had a great visit with the Visitors Center volunteer  while I waited.  They were gone for about 90 minutes but returned victorious.  Bob, the non-techy, had suggested he use the “Find My iPhone” app and they went to the marina office where there was a computer and tried it.  It showed them a satellite picture of exactly where the phone was.  Noah had gotten a ride with someone back to the highway and had left his phone on the back bumper of the truck and it had fallen off.

By the time that was done, we were hungry for lunch so we found a picnic table and ate.

We decided it was too late and too windy to canoe that day so headed back to our spectacular campground.  A local guy named Jim had come by our campsite every evening on his ATV  and had a beer with us and gave us the benefit of his local knowledge.  Jim came by on our last evening to remind us to be sure and visit the Nevada Northern Railway Museum in Ely, Nevada and we promised we would.

On Friday morning, Sept. 6^th, we sadly left Camelot Pinnacle and made our way up that magnificent road one more time.  We backtracked a little to Duchesne so that we could take what we had been told was a very scenic route down 191 to Rte 6.  Let me interrupt the narrative a minute to say that on this journey, we purposely try to avoid all Interstates and stay on the back roads and old byways of America.  The main reason is that they tend to be much prettier and more interesting but we also get much better gas mileage when we go 55 or 60 mph instead of 70 or 75.  And we’re not in a hurry.  We enjoy going through the small towns.

We were not disappointed in the route we took – the scenery was spectacular as we climbed and descended the mountains and then approached Delta, Utah near the west border of the state.  These two pictures were taken through the truck window on that route:

The campground in Delta was very nice and was right beside our route.   We went into town and visited another small museum that had lots of interesting information about the different types of rocks and gems in the area.  Many of the people that were at our campground were “rock hounds” who spent their days out in the surrounding hills, looking for interesting rocks.  There also had been a Japanese internment camp located nearby and the museum had some exhibits related to that.

We only stayed one night in Delta, Utah.  We were getting ready to start on what is known as “The Loneliest Road in America” – a stretch of Rte 50 across western Utah and Nevada that has very few towns on it and is only lightly traveled.  The few towns that we will pass have a rich history in mining and lots of original buildings from the old west so we are looking forward to traveling it.  We just have to be mindful of topping off our gas tank whenever we reach a town because we only have a range of about 160 miles on a tank. This picture was taken after we left Delta -- starting the Loneliest Road!

This one was taken a little further down the road.  Still straight and long but we can see mountains in the distance.

Soon after this picture was taken, we entered Nevada.  More about that in the next post!

If you have questions about the trip or the camping life, please email me and I’ll try to answer in my next post.  Thanks for sharing our trip with us.