Utah Road Trip : June 2010

[Darkanion]

Day 1 : Hidden Canyon and the wrong turn :

It was cool and rainy when I left Glenwood Springs, Colorado.. It was in the 80's (but felt hotter than that) when I got to Moab..

I couldn't check in at the motel until 3PM or so. So, I found a trail that I had read about that was I close to and I took off on it..

This was near the beginning of Hidden Canyon :

...and the same spot with my first attempt at a sig pic for the day.. :lol: :

Just one of the many random, scraggly-looking old trees I saw that day :

The road (and the view) ahead :

...the road behind. It doesn't look like much in this picture. But, it sure looked different from the bottom looking up :

As I was going along, I felt "sure" that I would eventually have to turn around. So, I missed some shots, down "in" the canyon. I went back on the last day and took those.. But, to keep the timeline consistent, I'll wait until later in the thread to post them..

When I came up out of the canyon, I took a wrong turn, went WAY out of my way, and found a "road" that I wasn't sure I should even be on..

But, I found THIS, which I thought was kind of cool looking :

If only I had turned left instead of right.. But, I DID learn some abilities of the car.. I learned some about its clearances.. I also learned to pay more attention to the map in the "Guide to Moab Backroads & 4WD Trails."

The GPS finally showed a "real" pseudo-road up ahead. So, I stopped and took a picture of the last little shelf out of the area I had been in..

From the front :

From the back :

The road behind :

Some wrong turns can teach you a lot! :lol:

 

[Darkanion]

Day 2, Part 1 : Shafer Switchbacks and Potash Road :

I started the day in Dead Horse Point State Park, because I had seen a picture like this shot on National Geographic's website and I thought it was a cool shot. Seeing that shot also made me curious about the road running through the bottom, which is what prompted me to figure out how to get down there.

The view from the overlook in Dead Horse Point State Park (you can see the road I referred to running through the bottom of the picture) :

The view Potash Road, heading towards the Potash Plants :

That water was very very blue. I wish I could've gotten some better views, closer up. But, most of the closer up views had a big fence between me and what I was wanting to take pictures of. I kept looking for a good vantage point. But, I never found one..

This is shot I had seen online that I wanted to go reproduce, if I could.. This is from the Green River Overlook in Canyonlands National Park :

My next destination was the Shafer Switchbacks and Potash Road. But, first, I stopped at the Overlook for the Shafer Switchbacks. The view of the road below.. er, ahead.. :

This is now down on the road, heading towards the Shafer Switchbacks. The road runs on top of the "shelf" that is formed by the rocks you see in this picture.. Very beautiful, rugged, but unforgiving country.. :

One of the swithbacks and the rock face above it :

I took several more pictures, going down the switchbacks. But, much like Pucker Pass (those come later), the pictures just don't do them justice. So, I'm not posting many of them. This was a good ways down toward the bottom of the road ahead :

I took this, thinking of using it as a sig pic, but it hasn't been edited for that yet. :

The road behind :

 

[Darkanion]

(day 2, part 1, continued) :

A rest stop area.. If I remember correctly, there was a camp ground area here.. No shade in sight (or at least not much of it)!

:

More rugged country :

The road twisting through a canyon floor area. I would imagine this would NOT be a good place to be if it started raining in the upper elevations.. :

More fallen rocks. More rugged country that the road is winding through :

Another place that I stopped at to get out and look around :

I'm glad the road is over HERE and not over THERE! "Watch that first step, it's a Lou-Lou!!" :lol: :

The first view of the river I had been wanting to get close to. (I never did really get 'close' to it.) :

A look around at what nature has created :

Another possible sig pic candidate. :lol: :

SNOW!! D'oh!! Wrong state! Salt!! Apparently, the Potash Plant also creates salt. :

I believe they call this one "Balancing Rock," but I'm not sure why... :biggrin:

 

[Darkanion]

Day 2, Part 2 : Pucker Pass and Long Canyon :

This is NOT my video, but I felt it maybe conveyed the area a bit better than some of my pictures did...

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F44bx6WIt4"]YouTube - Pucker Pass[/ame]

Now, on with my pictures!

This was my 2nd run of the day. The first one is actually mentioned by the guy in the video up above.. Shafer. Shafer, while fun, didn't make me wonder "is this thing ever going to stop sliding??" :lol:

First, the view down one of the switchbacks.. It was at this point that the trail started to get my attention. It doesn't look too bad in the picture, but it's worse than it looks. This was shot through the windshield, down, over looking over the passenger front fender :

This angle looks wrong to me... This was still going downhill. That was the view back to where I had come from...

...and the road ahead (more downhill, even if it doesn't "look" that way) :

Just a smidge of trail damage...

There was loose gravel & sand on one of the big rocks I went across and the road was too steep for the tires to be able to "woah!" me up before I slid off the rock.. Fortunately, I slid in the same direction the trail was going... But, the poor exhaust tip caught the bad end of the deal.. :

...oh! And you can see the rock from the video in the picture above. Yeah, it's really leaning over like that. I was a little un-nerved (again) for some of the pictures to come... :lol:

The view back to where the exhaust tip ran into the rock and suffered some structural reconfiguration... :lol: I'm pretty sure it was that upper-most ledge that I slid off of... After that I developed an 'appreciation' for what all-terrain tires might could do for me! :

The road ahead... "You're not actually going into an asteroid field are you??" :

The view back up...... from under the rock :

The view ahead...... from under the rock. That doesn't look so bad, does it? :

Until you get in front of it :

The view after getting out from under the rock :

And to be honest, I kind of didn't find very much all that interesting after that... So, not many more pictures were taken, as I continued along that trail...

 

[Darkanion]

Day 3 : Hidden Canyon, before heading home :

Before starting back home on Friday, I decided to go back out to Hidden Canyon, follow the directions better, run it right, and get those "down in the canyon" pics that I had missed from day 1.

...and here's how that unfolded...

The road behind :

The road ahead :

I sure am glad I found those Topo maps and uploaded them to the GPS before I went out there. The regular maps had jack-squat-nothin' on these trails. It would've been very easy to get off-trail and get big frikkin' lost!

This was a pretty good little step, but I didn't scrape anything.

This was my "next time, rent a dang Jeep" moment. (No, those are not my scrape-marks. Apparently, some people wanted to get up there a LOT more than I did! :lol :

Apparently, I was a 10th of a mile from where I wanted to be. But, I couldn't figure out an on-trail, "let's not tear anything up" way to get there. So, I went back out the way I came in and took the other half of the circle into / through Hidden Canyon (which is the way I went on day 1).

Down in the canyon. I think I mentioned before how deep and soft some of the sand was. I didn't stop in the sand very much. But, you can kind of see how the sand was forming a channel around the tires :

Going through the canyon area, avoiding the fallen rocks :

Heading back out of the canyon. This was actually the last picture I took on the trip :

And that's it! Unless I happen across some pictures that I want to add later, this should do it for the road trip pics.. Thanks for viewing!

 

[SubaCool]

I love your report (just like the CO one) Top notch!

This is NOT my video, but I felt it maybe conveyed the area a bit better than some of my pictures did...

I've had to laugh at these 'lads' :lol: After driving through Pucker Pass in my Outback, to see some tourists driving the rental Jeep was just too amusing (especially the commentary) Here are some shots for comparison from our trip in 2008:

The pictures don't do the justice to the steepness of this hill (pass)

I was literally vertical, standing on my brake pedal while my wife took this picture

Here's a link to a video of me coming down PP (sorry, poor quality):
https://good-times.webshots.com/video/3038008140101960247CFZXpT

I can't wait to go back to Moab/Utah. Some amazing landscape out there! We need to get a group of people from ORS (and other Subie forums) together and do a multi-day off-road trip out there

 

[Darkanion]

Thank you!

Yeah, I wasn't real sure what to expect out there. I had read how PP and Long Canyon were considered 'easy'. So, as I started down through there, I was wondering what "moderate" and "difficult" were for the guys who ranked PP a 2 out of 10. :lol:

I'm still VERY new to off-roading and I don't get to do it very often (since I'm in Texas and I haven't found anything around here yet).. I had a 2WD pickup before. So, even when I went to Colorado, there was only so far I felt comfortable pushing, since I was almost always alone..

So, when I made that turn to start going down through Pucker Pass, I started wondering just what the heck I had gotten myself into. I wasn't really scared or anything. I just wasn't expecting that much incline and that little traction, in some places.

I have to say, though, doing that was the most intense (in a good way) and memorable part of the trip! :ebiggrin: If I had gone to Moab first, I probably would've been more willing to push things a bit in Colorado. So, now I know for next time!

 

[Darkanion]

I just watched that video. It's kind of funny how it looks almost like you're on basically flat ground. Then, you start coming off of that rock and the front of the car just keeps going down and down and down. :lol:

 

[tinknocker07]

Great trip and great photos This was a really good post:ebiggrin:


Nate

 

[frogstar7055]

That's fantastic.

 

[Darkanion]

Thanks, guys! I've been reading on here for a while, but I haven't had a lot to contribute. So, I haven't said much... until now.

 

[frogstar7055]

Great vid as well.

 

[mr turbo]

Now thats a great trip report, with fantastic pics too.
What an amazing place. The colours & the canyons are simply stunning, to say the least.
Looks & sounds as though you had a great time. :biggrin:

Regards
Mr Turbo

 

[carljwnc]

You've done it again. Fantastic report, beautiful country.