Tuesday September 19th
From Wolf Den I drove through Wyoming for a while, before crossing briefly into Idaho, through hills which were quite barren, then along the edge of Bear Lake in Utah, which was pretty large – I could see the hills on the other side quite a distance away. I stopped in Bear Lake State Park Marina, off the main highway in a town called Garden City, and found they wanted payment to enter the park. The area was unstaffed, but unlike some other states, rather than wanting you to put cash in an envelope, they had an electronic payment system, so I could get a pass that way. I think this was one of the several places I noticed where they had tyre spikes to stop people coming in the exit. You could drive out with no problem, but woe betide your tyres if you drove in that way!
There was a large parking lot and a marina, and a bit of a beach along the lake nearby. I walked around for a little while, admiring the yellow flowers growing by the water, and noticing the hills behind the lake, which had copses of red trees along them. I’m not sure what they were, but they were very colourful, and I don’t think I ever saw them up close, but there were a lot of them here and there in that area. It was a partly cloudy day, and a pretty area.
I was running low on supplies, so I visited a “market” in the town – what the US seems to call small independent supermarkets, and got more tins for dinner, and lunch meat and other groceries. The town was supposed to be famous for its raspberry shakes, and I’d read an article discussing the pros and cons of the different spots. Well, there were plenty of signs advertising them, but from what I could see, each and every place that was advertising them was closed! I tried a few, and nothing was open. I guess they operated only during the school holiday season.
While planning, I’d found that near my route was a rather strange named park called Unita-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, which sounded quite nice, and not a big detour to go through it, so I drove off in that direction. I hadn’t realised that this was actually quite high up! After driving through some flat country, with mountains in the distance, entering Wyoming again, then back to Utah, the road started to climb up into them.
There were signs saying you needed to pay to park there, and I wasn’t sure if my US National Parks pass would cover it. I pulled over into an information bay to see if I could find out anything about that, and met another man there. He thought that my pass would be ok, and I had suspected that too, since it was a national forest, and I proceeded on. I passed an area with beautiful yellow grasses near a place called Sulphur Campground, and kept on to Mirror Lake.
Just before the lake, I stopped by a little heart-shaped lake called Butterfly Lake, with beautiful reflections. The area was at around 10,000 feet, and the van was working really hard to get up the steep gradients to get there. It probably didn’t help that it had lower than usual octane petrol in it.
In most of the US, the normal unleaded was sold as 87 octane (which is like our 91 apparently, they measure it differently), but places in Utah were selling 85 octane as their standard petrol. Apparently some places at higher altitudes did that, because you could get away with lower octane petrol when higher up. Also most petrol in the US was mixed with ethanol, and some places sold non-ethanol fuel at a premium.
After a while I got up to the lake, which wasn’t mirror-like at all, because there was a bit of a wind blowing, but it was a pretty spot. I parked and put my America the Beautiful parks pass card on the dash, and made some lunch. I found a bench near the lake, and ate there. There were bits of sun coming and going, with dark clouds around.
The weather was changing constantly at that altitude. I went for a little walk along the lake, admiring more of the yellow grasses, then drove up a little higher to a vantage point looking out over the lake and mountains beyond. There was quite a lot of forest around, I think pine trees, but about half of the trees were dead. Perhaps that was because the weather got quite fierce at that altitude. I could see drifts of rain coming and going across the mountains.
The road climbed steeply through some switchbacks, and I found myself at Bald Mountain Pass, about 10,700 feet (3,260m), apparently the highest paved road in Utah. I stopped to look at the view, then continued on down the other side of the mountain. On the way down I visited the pretty Upper Provo Falls, then as I got lower, I started seeing the hillsides covered with the red trees again, a spectacular sight, but I was struggling to find anywhere to pull off the road to take a photo.
A couple of kilometres before Kamas I saw a lovely scene with the red hills and some farm houses in the foreground, and pulled into a driveway to take a photo. Wouldn’t the occupant of the house be coming out just then! He pulled alongside me and asked me something along the lines of if he could help me. I explained that I was just pulling in to take a photo and asked if that was ok, and he said yes. Then he was having a bit of trouble getting out of the driveway with me there, so he asked me if I’d pull forward a bit. It was a rather steep driveway and I was a bit concerned I wouldn’t be able to back out again, but I went a bit further down, then got the photos I wanted.
I managed to get out again and back onto the main road, not so easy with all the traffic coming and going. From there I went through the towns of Kamas and Francis, approaching the Jordanelle Reservoir, which was pretty large, and quite a dramatic sight with flowers in the foreground, and dark mountains behind. I could see ski runs on the mountains (though without snow at that time of year), so it must have been quite high still.
There was an overlook a bit further along where I could see the whole reservoir, and a four-lane highway in the distance, which I was to join shortly. Somewhere along here Google took me along a small, low speed limit side road to avoid traffic, but I eventually ended up on the highway, which went along to Deer Creek Reservoir, where I stopped at a state park to have a quick look around, with more hills in the background dotted with patches of red trees.
I’d read about Bridal Veil Falls being quite pretty, just off the highway a bit further along. I turned off onto a small road off the highway, and parked near the falls, which had a couple of levels of waterfall which did look rather like a bridal veil. I walked along a track next to the falls for a little way. I was not enthusiastic about Google's choice of having me turn left across four lanes of fast moving traffic to get back onto the highway, with no obvious place to stop in the middle. This was a bit tricky in a not very nimble campervan, but I managed to get across after a while thank the Lord.
The highway went into the city of Provo, a fairly large place, where I joined with the Interstate I-15, with some very interesting driving indeed. Usually when an Interstate went through a major city, they would lower the speed limit to maybe 55mph (88km/h) where there were a lot of entries and exits, but here the speed limit was 70mph (112km/h), four or five lanes each way, with lanes coming and going for different exits, cars changing lanes continuously, and I wasn’t the slowest vehicle, so I was in one of the middle lanes.
Usually I was one of the slowest vehicles, keeping the speed limit, which most people didn’t, and it was fairly easy just driving in the right lane and passing trucks every so often, but there was more to look out for in the middle lanes. It sometimes felt a little vulnerable venturing out into the middle lanes, when there was fast traffic. People were also zooming by at different speeds, and some were going slowly, and I had to continuously look in the mirrors at the lanes either side so I knew whether I could change lanes to pass someone, and not be run down by a fast person zooming up. It was pretty exacting, I had to concentrate hard, and was glad when I was through that bit!
The Interstate continued on to Las Vegas eventually, but I turned off to go towards the RV park where I’d booked in, at the rather strangely named town of Helper. I wound through hills, with a train line next to the road, and it was getting toward 7 as I started to enter some interesting looking canyon-like territory, and arrived at Blue Cut RV park after a bit more driving. This was off the main highway, though there was a rather main looking road running near it, and also the train line wasn’t far away, but the trains didn’t seem to run very often, I think I heard only one or two, and there wasn’t a lot of traffic on the road. There didn't seem to be any RV parks in the area that weren't near the train line. Opposite the park was an impressive rock face. At night it looked as thought maybe it was lit up somehow.
I had spoken to the owner when I booked, a few months back, and she was very friendly. I contacted her on the day to make sure it was ok to arrive lateish, and she was fine with that, and said to message her when I got there so she knew I’d arrived ok, which was nice. I was to pay cash in an envelope, $40, and post it in a slot. There were free showers as I recall, and a little stream running alongside the grounds. Some of the commercial RV parks had quite nice facilities, almost like a normal bathroom, with a shower, toilet and washbasin. The state and national campgrounds were a bit varied, some had large communal rooms, sometimes with shower cubicles that had curtains you could pull, and other places had individual rooms each with a toilet and washbasin – especially the ones that had unisex toilets.
After having the temperature below or around freezing the previous few nights, it was around 9 degrees at night there, which felt quite warm! The campground was around 5,500 feet (1,675m) I think, which was still quite high, but I think I was able to dispense with my sleeping bag as a doona that night. It had been a big day of very varied scenery, plains, lakes, mountains and canyons!
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