(written on the 18th)
Gratefully, I was undisturbed in my little spot at the intersection of a main dirt road and what looked like a significantly lesser used dirt road.
It was a skinny road, so I was slightly worried about being in someone’s way if by chance someone happened to be on the road in the middle of the night or early in the morning.
I did figure that anyone who was driving on that road probably was in a four-wheel drive vehicle, and I tried to make at least enough room beside me that they could go around me despite the narrowness of the road.
And I did hear loud trucks driving by, but that wasn’t too much of a bother.
Once I was finally up and out of the van, I noticed reflections of light not too far away in the distance, maybe a couple hundred yards or so.
So I drove over to check it out and found that someone had apparently used a whole grundle of old old classic cars to help build a retaining wall?
They looked like cars from maybe the ’40s? And they were all lined up but mostly buried, creating a bank of earth.
🤷
As I drove away heading south, I saw another rattlesnake. Three in two days. That’s… a lot, considering I think I’d only ever seen three in the wild before until I moved to South Dakota, where I saw I think maybe two last year when driving home from the temple?
To be fair, five of the rattlesnakes I’ve seen have been while driving in my van down the road, so though it counts, it’s not as though I were on a hiking trail somewhere in danger of being bitten.
With the heat of the day coming on, I thought about getting myself wet for a little bit of evaporative cooling refreshment, so I stopped off at the Yampa River, my first encounter with it, but the water looked… less than enticing. 😅
I left the main road heading toward Dinosaur National Monument, which took me onto a dirt road that looks like it’s rarely used. At first, I actually felt like I was driving on some farmers’ private roads, as there were old farming buildings and equipment on both sides, and the directions from Google had me taking turns through all these buildings. 😅
Apparently, not many people enter the park from the east side. 😆
The dirt road was definitely rough to begin with, but nowhere near as rough as it would be later in the day. 😬
I stopped off at pretty much all of the points of interest that I had found before I lost reception, including a pretty awesome cluster of super old cabin remains.
After nearly four hours of driving on rough back-country roads and perhaps a half mile of walking (round trip), I finally came to the first major viewpoint.
That was the start to some truly incredible views. Over the next several hours of driving, I stopped many times to take pictures of stunning vistas.
There were also a fair number of… sideways events… that at first I did really well with, before continued sideways experiences eventually would get the better of me. 😕
One of the first such experiences was my phone shaking itself off of the magnet it was held to (to be fair, that happens anyway even on non-shaky roads because the magnet in my phone case is garbage compared to the magnets that come with the little dashboard magnet holders).
At least this is my best guess of when it, my phone fell off the magnetic holder and smashed into the metal frame of my seat, that is exposed because the trim is missing.
When that happened, I instinctively looked at my screen, but I breathed this I have relief because there was no damage whatsoever. What I didn’t realize was that the glass covering my cameras was mashed in.
Who was mashed in so badly that the glass was pointing inward toward the middle camera with several spider cracks cutting through the view of the other two cameras.
😕
Gratefully, I took it in stride and didn’t even react much at all. 🙏
But that was just the first thing that went sideways…
Gratefully also, I don’t know how they do it, but cameras are apparently designed to be able to take pictures even with cracks in the way. I couldn’t do anything if the light was glaring off the cracks, but if the picture I wanted to take wasn’t facing light, I was okay to take decent pictures. 🙏
Oddly, the closer I got to parts of the park that were more used, the worse the road got. 🤔
My biggest concern was just sharp rocks puncturing tires, with the most likely scenario being that I slid sideways into a sharp rock that hit a tire’s sidewall.
As I descended down a canyon toward the river at… Echo Park? there were a number of attractions worth stopping to look at, another old cabin that looked more like a modern house, along with an old metal topped covered wagon.
Was it a sauna covered wagon? It had an old metal chimney pipe sticking out of the side of it (a lot like a wood stove for a tent).
There were also some cool petroglyphs from perhaps 1000 years ago.
A cave that, in my personal experience, is unique.
Whispering Cave… basically a section of the mountain that had separated itself and formed an absolutely enormous crack or tiny slot cave that goes back perhaps hundreds of feet, if not more.
Google says it only goes back 50 ft before it’s impassable, and that’s… absolutely baloney. I myself went back probably 100 ft before to keep going, I would need to get on my belly and crawl, because the slot was too skinny at standing height but opened up a bit where my feet were.
I wasn’t up for that kind of caving by myself. 🙃
I didn’t realize that Echo Park campground was the end of the line. 😅
That was a little annoying, but I had no reception to be able to verify where all the roads went, and it was an absolutely beautiful view down there.
I took advantage of the long drop, and also filling up my water at a potable water hydrant. 🙏
Since I hadn’t yet eaten , and it was almost 3:00, I decided to stop and take a lunch break, making myself a few tasty burritos (need to use up the sour cream before it goes bad in the heat. 🙃)
Speaking of heat, after lunch, I decided to go take a dip in the river to cool off, as I hadn’t yet all day, and it was toasty.
Gratefully, the river was not toasty. 🙏
It was quite refreshing, with a powerful current that at one point I thought might drag me down river. 😅
Unfortunately, putting my head underwater and swimming with all my might got me back to safe waters. 🙏
I don’t think there was really much of any danger, because it’s a pretty calm river overall, but it wouldn’t have been fun to whack my my shins against rocks in shallower waters or have to find my way back after getting washed down river for however long. 😆
Echo Park campground was pretty much the first time that I saw much evidence of life. To that point, I had seen I think maybe two cars over the last… six hours of driving? (and one road grater).
And those two vehicles were parked off in the distance, such that I couldn’t see anybody.
Once I realized that the Echo Park campground was a dead end, I was a little enjoyed because I didn’t want to drive all the way South to get back to where I wanted to go, but I didn’t seem to have much of a choice.
Oddly, the road out of Echo Park to the more civilized portion of the park was atrocious.
As I started trying to navigate it, going up into the higher elevations, the whole van bouncing and jerking, my microwave popped out of its spot, fell over onto the bed, and bounced into my side door’s glass.
Gratefully, the glass didn’t break, I have no idea if the microwave is okay or not.
My bug screen got torn, as did my sun-reflecting bubble wrap.
That’s when I started losing my cool a little bit. I’d managed to hold it together without much of a concern for the last several hours with multiple frustrations taking their toll, but the microwave ordeal was the source of my first outburst.
After a long drive, up, up, and up out of the canyons, out of the valleys above the canyons, and finally to the tops of the mountains above, there were some pretty decent views looking back (I stopped at several lookout points).
Unfortunately, the pictures didn’t turn out very well. Not sure if it was because of the damaged camera glass or just… The fact that this is a cell phone camera taking these pictures and not a real camera.
Though I lived in Utah for more than 20 years, I think, I don’t think I’d ever seen a Mormon cricket?
Well, I certainly did today. 😆
They were hopping around all over the road. I tried to miss them on my first go round, but after hearing about how destructive they are, I wasn’t as careful the second time. Yes, I still tried to miss them, but I was less concerned that I was hitting some. 😅
My frustrations really began to mount when Google Maps kept trying to take me on roads that turned out to be private or pretty much inaccessible.
I was getting low on fuel, and it kept routing me to roads that connected up with the roads I needed to go to, but they were actually private roads, which I didn’t know until I’d already been on that road for a good little while.
I was starting to run low on fuel, so it was more important to be getting the correct roads. 😅
Not to mention the roads were so skinny that trying to turn a 22-ft van around (I think that’s about what I am) on a road that’s not even 22 ft wide (maybe more like 12…, is… challenging. 😅
After multiple wrong routes taken, I finally ended up on a road that I was allowed to take and that took me all the way to the road that I was hoping to get on. 🙏
To my surprise, the road that I needed to get on was the worst road I’d had experienced all day.
But wait, Stephen, it’ll get worse! 😅
After finally reaching the road that I needed to be on, thinking that I was going to be somewhere in Civilization because I was only a handful of miles from all the main attractions, what I ended up dealing with was a super super steep grade of super rough road.
The super steep grade was constant, for miles and miles, I think, the only way to give the brakes a heat break being stopping the van all together.
I couldn’t descend the road faster than probably 5 mph generally, which made for super slow going trying to avoid big dips and big bumps and sharp rocks.
I was a bit frustrated with the condition of the road, being so close to the popular parts of the park that I expected them to be better than way out in the boonies where I had been where almost no traffic went through.
The road was bad enough, that I finally just pulled over into the first larger turnout that I came across and decided to just pull over and hang out there until the sun went down.
But there I was greeted by swarms and swarms of flies. I have no idea what kind of fly they are. I didn’t notice them trying to bite me at all. But nor would they land. They would just sit there and swarm around your head and body, not landing to check out to see if you were edible. Not looking for food, I know because I left them food elsewhere, so they would leave me alone. No, they just wanted to hang out with me.
So persistent were they that I finally just straight up lost my cool for a good little while.
😕
Eventually, I gave up, turned the van around so at least if I was going to be in a baking van, it wouldn’t be with the sun directly on me, and sat there wasting time away escaping into, gratefully, only neutral diversions.
[sigh]
I’d handled so many things going sideways today with relative patience and near nonchalance, but the Google Maps issues and finally the flies did me in.
😞
Incredibly, when I finally decided to finish descending the mountain into the valley below, the road was the worst it had been the entire day.
😶
Good crap.
I finally started trying to listen to some uplifting music to bring some light in, ironically, as the sun was going down (though it was still not down and was perfectly positioned in absolutely the worst part of the sky to be cooking me as I was trying to descend).
Eventually, I managed to make it down into the valley below where the mountains in the distance blocked the Sun and gave me shade. That shade brought a palpable sense of relief. 🙏
My next stops took me to some more petroglyphs, which were pretty cool, despite the fact that the sun was down, and the glyphs were getting harder to see.
My sister Heather started texting me around that time, and we texted back and forth for a bit, which was nice as I was still not back in the light, though I wasn’t in the midst of the darkness anymore.
Thx, Heather. 🤍
I was sort of in that in between where I was calm and in a decent space, but a little discouraged that I had reacted the way that I had after the frustrations mounted.
Being after sunset, and being alone, I was a little more careful. Though it’s desert, this is also bear country and mountain lion country, not to mention I was walking along dusty dirt trails into the hillsides to look at glyphs, so… prime location for mountain lions and especially rattlesnakes on the path.
Beautiful, though. 😊
Gratefully, I didn’t have any run-ins with anything unfriendly, and I think after crossing over 15,000 steps for the day, I made my last stop, Josie’s cabin.
Josie’s cabin was a cool little spot right next to a spring, where a lady slightly younger than I whose kids were grown and gone had decided to move up into the rocky, dusty mountains.
For something like 60 years, until she died at the age of 90ish? She lived there in this beautiful little spot.
I wandered inside the cabin and was greeted by mice and then bats flying around that seemingly miraculously avoided me and the walls of the cabin, despite flying quite quickly.
Though I knew they weren’t intending to dive bomb me, feeling dive bombed, I got out of the cabin rather quickly. 😆
I toyed with the idea of just sleeping right there in the little turnarounds next to the cabin, but decided against it, heading instead toward “civilization,” looking for little places to stop along the way.
Eventually, I came across a very little used dirt road, and took it up into a hill beside the road, barely making it up in the deep sand, but thought better of it, headed back down, and then followed another unkept dirt road deeper into a little canyon.
It was dark by then, but that didn’t stop those nasty flies. It wasn’t long after being outside of the van that they began to swarm me, so I got back in my van as quickly as I could, closed the door, and called it a night.
Having been baking in the sun all day, it was not cool inside the van. Gratefully, it’s a dry heat, and gratefully I have my little battery operated fan to mitigate the heat. 🙏
Wow. What a day. 😅
I guess I can say that my efforts to take an alternate, explorative route to Utah have been successful. 😆
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 