This past Fall we took some time off to get back to the desert. We drove west, and spent the night in Western Colorado. This was when I realized the Cradlepoint didn't work. This was slightly problematic, as I had a conference call scheduled for Monday and now we need to be in cell range, instead of Skypeing in for the call.
We decided to head to Valley of the Gods where we knew there was cell service. We stayed in VOG for two days, got in some great long bike rides, some fun short hikes, and made my conference call.
We decided to visit Natural Bridges National Monument, as we'd not been there before. It was a short drive from VOG and we arrived mid morning.
We went into the visitor center and learned three things: 1.) the campground there is tiny, 2.) 30 minutes earlier they had a couple of open sites, and 3.) there were several people lined up listening to the ranger repeating the first two facts. So we quickly left and drove straight to the campground. There were maybe 12 sites, and all were taken. After our second trip around the loop, though, Nancy saw a guy carrying a bag of trash to the dumpster. She jumped out of the truck and asked if they were leaving. They were. So she walked back to the campsite and waited for them to drive off, and I drove back around the loop to position myself to fill their vacated space.
We quickly set up camp, which involves unfolding the camp chairs. The next hour we sat and watched the same people we saw at the visitor center forlornly drive repeated loops looking for an open campsite.
Normally, we try to avoid campgrounds. However, like a number of NPS campgrounds, this place was pretty nice. Each campsite on the outside of the loop was about an acre in size, and we had open desert on three sides of us. We had a view and no visible neighbors. Not a bad deal. We decided to walk the 8 mile loop and visit all of the natural bridges. It wound up being a great hike and we had the opportunity to see the bridges up close. One had petroglyphs at its base, something you couldn't see from the "view area".
The next day we took off and drove west. In retrospect, we should have boondocked some place between Natural Bridges and Hanksville, but instead we drive to Hanksville and got fuel and some groceries. While there, we met a couple in a Westphalia who told us one could get water at the BLM office in town. So we did.
We drive through Capitol Reef, which was super crowded and over Boulder Mountain to Boulder, UT. We asked if we could park the truck at Boulder Mtn Lodge and were denied. However, we did learn of a couple of new boondocking places nearby..so we went there.
We drove back into Boulder that evening to have dinner at HBG, which was, as always, spectacular.
The next morning, we went back to HBG for breakfast and drove west. We decided to see if we could stay at Calf Creek Falls and do that hike. Turns out THAT is also a tiny campground, and it features a road so narrow only one vehicle can cross the creek at a time. We stopped and waited for some guy towing a huge trailer, who told us there were no open spots.
We were bummed, but realized we had to do the loop anyway to leave as the ER was too large to turn around. At the very end of the loop was a huge drive-through site that was empty! WTF!
We parked there and couldn't believe our luck. Once again, we sat and watch sad people doing sad slow loops looking for non-existent campsites.
We hiked the trail to the falls and saw that Calf Creek is FULL of huge trout. We had our fishing stuff with us, but no UT license. Good to know for future reference.
That night, we were getting ready to eat and watching the sad would-be camper parade when a guy got out of his 4Runner and asked if he could park in front of us and sleep in his truck. My knee-jerk was "no", but the more we talked the more he seemed like a good guy and we finally said, "if you have firewood (we didn't) you are good". So..he brought a box of firewood over and had dinner with us. Turns out he was a super interesting guy who is reinventing himself as a photographer. We talked for some time. In the morning, he was gone by the time we woke up.
We took off later and headed back over Boulder Mountain, past Capitol Reef (again) and into the Swell.
The San Rafael Swell is considerably more popular than it once was, and it took a long time to find a place to camp. We finally did, and set up as far away from other people as we could. While there, we hiked a slot canyon, which was fun, and the following day did a long bike ride. The weather was starting to look sketchy and we could see rain off in the distance. Rather than take a chance of getting stuck in the mud, we took off and drove to Rabbit Valley. By the time we got there, it was late and most of the camping spots were full, so we wound up camping in one of the parking lots.
That kind of sucked, but it was just for the night.
Once again, we drove more than we wanted to..and if nothing else, the trip reinforced the need to be more aggressive about limiting drive time.