My last article which included the awesome Jeep trip we did with my sister to the top of Pinyon Peak, reminded me that I had not shared some other great Jeep trips we have done. So I will be sharing those in this article and one that will follows it–Part 2.
I’ll start with the first trips we did in the Jeep in this article and then follow it up with the more recent trips. Our first set of adventures were mostly with a friend of mine from work and his wife. They are wonderful people and we decided to start doing some Jeep trips together where we would go and camp overnight. My sister came along with us on one of these adventures.
Our first trip was over our anniversary in May. We started the trip by visiting Little Black Mountain Petroglyphs site. There were a lot of petroglyphs here and we hiked around and saw a bunch of them.
Then we drove to the Trumbull School House which is where we stopped for lunch. You can go into the old school house which they have made into a bit of a museum. We ate our lunch inside the schoolhouse and then we pushed on. We had a brief stop at the Bar 10 Ranch which is a ranch where you can sleep in a Conestoga if you want. We then pushed on and took a little side road to Pa’s Pockets. This is an old ranch area where there are natural pockets in the rock which catch the rain water and then the water is piped to the watering troughs for the cattle. There is an old cabin that is also a bit of a museum.
Then we drove right to the edge of the Grand Canyon overlooking the Whitmore Rapids of the Colorado River. What an amazing view!! We camped right on the very edge of the Grand Canyon with no one else even around. It was amazing. It was our first time using the Deep Sleep 4 Jeep air mattress to sleep in the back of the Jeep and it was awesome. So comfortable!
Right where we were camped, you could see a fairly recent (in earth time) lava flow where it flowed over the edge of the canyon and dammed up the river. The river had to cut through it over many years. The Grand Canyon view was amazing, but even more interesting to me was a little side canyon off of the Grand Canyon called Whitmore Canyon. The lava also flowed over into the canyon, but for some reason, here the lava formed into polygonal pillars. Really cool looking. Unfortunately Mike and I did not take pictures of them. 🙁 They were amazing.
That night, the stars were incredible. The Milky Way was totally visible and we saw a satellite train of the Starlink satellites that had launched recently. That was pretty cool. It was a fabulous trip. Good friends, good food, good fun and epic views. It doesn’t get much better than this, but then it does… on our next adventure with this same couple. My sister joined us for this one.
This adventure took place at Ashley Twin Lakes in the Uintas part of the Ashley National Forest. This trip was in June, but it was super high in elevation, so it turned out to be quite cold and the wind blew a lot. We were very glad to be sleeping in our Jeep but my sister was not as lucky because she was sleeping in her hammock. Sleeping would have been nice, but because of the wind, she didn’t sleep much. She was warm but to much noise from her rainfly flapping. Well, I have jumped way forward in our story.
We started near Flaming Gorge and headed off into the forest. We started our adventure by visiting Big Brush Creek Cave. It was really amazing because the entire Big Brush Creek, a good sized stream flows into the cave and so goes underground at that point. It was a really amazing sight to see the water flow into this cave and disappear into its depths. We hiked into the cave for a little ways, but were stopped by the creek and low walls and ceiling.
We continued on our journey. There was still a little snow here and there and you could tell it was the Spring runoff because sometimes we were driving in water on the road.
It turned out that we were the first people down this particular road for the season because we ended up having to clear not one, not two, but three fallen trees from across the road. Luckily we had brought our hand chainsaw. It had saved our hike one time in the Uintas because we had to cut through a tree on that trip too. It saved our ride on this trip but we had to do three times to work.
We took turns on either end of the chainsaw and cut through each of the three trees twice to get them out of the way. We also used the winch that we had installed on our Jeep to move the very large trees. It was a lot of work but surprisingly a lot of fun and very memorable. It was amazing to know that we were the first humans down this road that year. In fact, maybe a few years because the road did not look very used.
Our efforts were rewarded when we came to the lake. We drove up onto the embankment of the lake and right out on to a finger which stuck out into the lake. We camped out there with lake on two sides of us. It was incredible!
Our friends had brought their kayaks so we got to go out kayaking on this beautiful alpine lake. We saw no one else until the tail end of the second day. It was just us out in this beautiful wilderness. My sister ended up taking this absolutely epic photo of the sunrise and our Jeep (because she was not sleeping).
We went hiking and just enjoyed so much being there (except for the lack of sleep for my sister). Another epic adventure.
Inspired by these trips, Mike and I planned a trip of our own to the Uintas. It turned out to be really a great trip with some amazing scenery in a very dramatic looking canyon, a lake and an awesome camp right by a stream. We absolutely loved this trip together too. We took highway 35 from Francis, Utah. The much less popular road into that part of the Uintas. We turned off on Forest Road (FR) 135 and it went up and over a pass a dropped down into a bowl like area surround by high canyon walls with pinnacles. It was beautiful.
Then we wound our way to the back side of the Grand Daddy basin ( the side you don’t hike on). On that road we found an amazing camp spot right by a stream. It was so peaceful to sit and listen to the stream and especially at night while sleeping.
Then the next day we continued back down and then turned to go past the Upper Stillwater Reservoir and then further on to FR 222 which took us up to a small little lake called Bear Lake (not the big one on the border with Idaho). It was a pretty little lake with hundreds of dragon flies all around. We were thinking of camping one more night but decided the lake would likely have lots of mosquitoes because of the high dragon fly population, so instead we went back to the Hades Campground (not a great name for it because it was absolutely beautiful). We stayed there for a night and then headed home. It was such a fun trip. We thoroughly enjoyed it.
The next adventure was very different from the others. It was still an amazing experience, but it was to one of the most bleak and desolate areas I think I have ever visited–the Newfoundland mountain range in northern Utah. This mountain range is west of the Great Salt Lake in a very arid and dry desert location. It reminded me of Jordan in the Middle East where we visited several years ago. But even in such a desolate place there is beauty.
The first interesting aspect of this trip was that we drove right to the edge of the Great Salt Lake. We walked out onto the salty area left behind by it and saw the amazingly blue green water. it was really pretty. Then we continued driving to a cave which was large enough for both of our Jeeps to drive up into it and we could have camped in the cave. It was at the very beginning of our trip, so we determined to continue on to the Newfoundlands.
To get to them we had to drive on the causeway which was created for the railroad. So we were driving along the side of the railroad tracks for many miles. It was cool when we had a train go right by us. Driving right next to a train help us understand the size and weight of those things. While on this stretch of the trip we saw one of the Bangerter Pumps. Utah’s Governor Bangerter developed a project to install pumps in strategic locations to be able to pump water from the Great Salt Lake. This was after a huge flood year in Utah. The pumps only used one year after they were built so the project was considered a complete waste of resources. But the pumps are maintained and are still there. We drove right by one. Then we turned left across the tracks and head south into the Newfoundlands.
The landscape was bleak but with its own beauty. The Newfoundlands are surrounded by the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Flats. We explored many of the roads in the Newfoundlands and saw old trucks and cabins and other evidence of people living and working in this very inhospitable location. The planned route ended up not working out because there was an area that was just too steep for us to feel comfortable going in the Jeeps. So we started setting up camp, when we suddenly had huge winds and what looked like potential rain. We were completely exposed on mountains with no trees–nothing but brush. So we decided to head back to the cave and spend the night there.
When we arrived at the cave, someone else was already camping there, so we found an ok spot out in the valley and set up camp. We had dutch oven chicken that night and it was fabulous. One interesting thing is that by where we were cooking, we saw the front of the exo-skeleton of a tarantula spider. That’s the first time in all my life of living in Utah that I saw evidence of tarantulas. I had always been told that we had them in Utah, but I had never seen one. It was a good sized one and we found its hole near by, but we never actually saw the spider. It probably came out at night when we were warm in our Jeeps.
While we were making dinner, we played with our friends trick kite and it was a lot of fun to fly. The winds were nice and strong and so it was perfect for it. We just had an all around fun time together.
In the morning, a funny, but slightly gross thing happened. We had a toilet seat we had been using for years when we would go car camping. It is one of those that you put the bag under it to catch the sewage with some powder to congeal it and then you can take your waste out of the area with you. It sounds gross, but actually isn’t that bad. In this particular case, we had just dug a hole and had the toilet seat chair sitting over the top of it. Well, I had just done my morning dump when the toilet chair broke and I landed–you guessed it–right in the muck. Luckily I had my handy dandy Huggies wet wipes with me and was able to clean up. It was freezing though.
We sat around eating breakfast and chatting for quite a while. It had warmed up nicely and the wind had stopped so it was quite pleasant. Then we packed it up and headed to our last stop of the trip–an arch. We drove for a bit up the road that is actually the edge of the proving grounds for the military. Up that road we came to a natural arch. We hiked up to the arch. This was the last stop on this really unique and interesting trip.
We headed home and our separate ways. Them to Utah County and us to Hurricane, Utah. Another fun trip with our friends.
The last trip for this article was with my sister. A girls’ Jeepin’ trip. When Mike and I go together, Mike always drives because he gets car sick otherwise. So I never get to drive the Jeep and I love to drive the Jeep. I also was in great need of some time away. I initially planned to do this trip on my own. I love to travel by myself and have done it many times, but this happened to coincide with Fall break for my sister who is a teacher, so we decided to go together. We went to explore the Boise National Forest and then visit with one of our nieces who lives in the Boise area. It was a beautiful trip.
The first night we arrived after dark around 9pm at the Lake Walcott State Park campground. It was a great place to spend the night. Even though it was really cold, we slept nice and warm in our sleeping bags in Beauty (the Jeep). The next morning it warmed up this the sun and we explored the lake for a bit and did a bit of hiking. Nice state park. Then we got back on the road to get to our chosen campsite for the night in the Boise National Forest.
We climbed on a fairly easy 4 x 4 road. It happened to be the opening weekend of the deer hunt, so there were hunters all over the place. We were worried we wouldn’t have a campsite. But when we arrived, there was hardly anyone there. I think we were outside of the hunting area. But the big reason may have been the cold. It was comfortable with a coat on during the day, but it was definitely dropping well below freezing at night because there was ice on the puddles. We decided to stay elsewhere and lower.
So we still had plenty of daylight so we drove down the other side and found a campground that had several hunter camps in it but there was one site open, so we took it. It was a great campsite. We arrived at just before dark and got cooking immediately. Then it was cold enough that we just climbed into the Jeep into our sleeping bags and played games until it was time to sleep.
The next morning one of the hunters took pity on us and offered us some coffee. That was kind of him even though we are not coffee drinkers. It was too cold. We packed up and headed down the canyon to a beautiful drive along the river and by a reservoir. Then we drove to our niece’s home and spent a couple of days with them. We played with the kids, went to see the ducks, ate together and attended church virtually together. It was really fun to spend time with their family. The kids are super cute don’t you think.
All too soon it was time to pack up and head home to get back to work.
Stay tuned to part 2 for more fun Jeepin’ adventures. Beauty (that’s our Jeep) will get flexy on several of the trips and we will learn what a stock Rubicon can do.