October 9, 2004—Utah’s Highway to Heaven (or, Is It Really This Steep?)
Saying goodbye to friends is never easy, but we wished Don and Ellen a safe trip as they left Thursday morning for their long drive home. We moved back to Portal and did errands like laundry, dumped tanks, filled with fuel and water, etc. Marc was waiting for a UPS delivery of some new shoes and once we had those on Friday about 2 p.m. we left.
We had decided to traverse Highway 24 to 12 on our way to Bryce, so we once again made the turnoff from I-70 that led us past our former visit to Goblin Valley and we soon made the dusty junction town of Hanksville. From there, the highway follows the Fremont River, a mud brown wash filled with golden cottonwood at this time of year. It was very pretty, but the road was narrow leaving town and all the spur roads leading off looked very rough and soft.
We finally happened upon Coal Mine Road, which turned to the north and had signage indicating it was an OHV area. Since it was gravel we felt safe traversing it but after two miles nothing suitable presented itself save a gravel shelf above a deep wash. Marc felt the ground would be suitable to hold the rig as long as it didn’t rain and since there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky all day we pulled in. It was hauntingly beautiful in its way, with nearly a moonscape of landscape. An evening walk brought forth an unusual occurrence. We saw a smudge of grey on the eastern horizon in an otherwise crystal blue sky as the sun had set, and have since found out it is the Earth’s penumbra. This is the edge of Earth’s own shadow being projected onto our planet’s upper atmosphere. With nothing here to block the horizon, we were witnesses to a rare phenomenon. A few dirt bikers past our way, but other than that, it was very quiet and we woke early and got back out on the road.
What follows will be a post of our trip on Hwy 24 leading into Hwy. 12 as far as Calf Creek Recreation area, located between Boulder and Escalante. Bear with our pictures please, since they were almost all shot from the truck as it was moving, either out the side window or the front bug-spattered one. You see, Hwy. 12 is steep. It is either steep going up, or steep going down, but it’s nearly always one or the other and not much in between and with no adequate pull offs for a rig our size so we just had to keep going.
Leaving our boondocking spot of this morning, the landscape continued to present its moonscape appearance through the tiny collection of buildings called Cainville and into Capitol Reef National Park. At the park, it enters more canyon country as Utah’s great monoliths once again appear, very similar to what is found around Moab. Since we had explored similar recently, we passed on stopping in this park, save for a few pictures. (For those of you who may be interested in some great photos of this park, please click on this link to our buddies Dave and Barb’s website, who toured this area extensively in June. etcetera1.net .) One of the great joys of the day however, was to find that fall has come to southern Utah.
And fall in all her splendor presented herself as we quickly gained altitude just above Torrey after the junction with Hwy. 12. The grade was not marked (we later learned it was 8%) and Marc misjudged the quickness of the ascent and as he tried to shift to lower gears the transmission locked out and we eventually ground to a complete stop. For those of you who have never driven a manual big truck transmission (no synchromesh) with 43,000 pounds attached, to start again on an 8% grade is not something to be taken lightly. Fortunately for us, there’s not a lot of traffic on this highway this time of year and Marc did the ol’ put on the air brake and let the clutch out at the same time trick. We still left burnt clutch for ten feet as the Freightliner lurched and protested mightily like the Little Engine That Could, revving to the red line to make second gear and travel faster than 5 mph.
At first, the forest is made up of ponderosa pine with a few aspen sprinkled in. However, as we climbed, the pine trees got fewer and fewer until finally, at nearly the 9000 feet level, the forest is totally aspen grove. At this elevation, most had lost their leaves and the temperature dropped to 53 sunny degrees. There are several small forest service campgrounds along this highway but most seemed to preclude a rig our size so we didn’t even stop to investigate.
Dropping quickly down to a lower elevation—at an 8% grade, it doesn’t take long, the aspen grew sparser and the colors became more muted as oak and pine became predominant just to the east of the small enclave of Boulder. Leaving Boulder, we approached what is known as the Hogsback—essentially a fin of earth, rising between two perilous canyons, upon which they have built the highway. It has several small wide spots and we choose the largest one for our lunch stop. To the right out my window, dropped Calf Creek Canyon and its small (from this level) hiking path which leads to Upper Calf Creek Falls, a very popular hike. As one can note from the highway signs, the road gets more interesting with each progressing mile. Finally, near the bottom of the canyon, sits lovely Calf Creek Recreation Area, which boasts a small campground, entirely filled this day.
For this day’s boondocking, we made it to a dirt road called Hole in the Rock, about 5 miles east of Escalante. It seems to be a dispersed BLM area, complete with dumpster and about four other widely spaced rigs amidst the pinion pine and juniper. From here, we intend to explore and most likely will have more posts. I’ll end this with a lovely panorama of the Escalante’s Hwy. 12 serpentine. This is a definite must do highway in anyone’s book and is rated as one of America’s top ten drives.
