Desert, Mountains, and Aliens

Sept 7

For the first time in over three months, we point the car east. On the way out of Monte Rio we stopped at Penngrove Pub in … (wait for it) …. Penngrove! to grab a bite. That place has a cool vibe, well worth a longer visit if we are ever back in these parts. We hop on Hwy 12 to skirt Sonoma, and 121 toward Napa. So many grapes. We wind up retracing much of last year’s route. We go up a crazy high, steep, winding road into the Sierra Nevadas through Priest to find our campground in the tiny mountain town of Groveland, California. It’s a funky campground we found on Hip Camp – Farmer John fenced off a corner of his cattle pasture on top of a hill, scattered some picnic tables around, and installed a few propane-heated outdoor showers. Delightful.

Sept 8

Today was our Yosemite drive-thru. We hope for a National Forest site on the other side of the park, but they are all ridiculously small and mostly occupied. So, we head to the nearest town of Lee Vining and settle into an RV park just as the sun sets.

That’s El Capitan in the background.

Sep 9

Early rise, a mug of coffee, and a long drive into the sun across Nevada. We pass through Benton, which is not much more than a few run down ranch buildings and the old Benton Inn and Hot Springs, which has a few campsites equipped with private hot tubs. Next time!

We drive Hwy 375, the Extraterrestrial Highway as it goes through Area 51. Didn’t see any aliens but we did notice the few tourist traps capitalizing on them.

After 7 hours we pull into Snow Canyon State Park. Even at 5:00 pm it is HOT, so we drop the trailer and head immediately into town to find some AC and a cool beverage. Turns out to not be that easy to find a bar in St. George, Utah!

Sept 10-12

Hot hot hot. Good news (?) is that Kayla has lots of work to do, so we shelter in the St. George Library during the heat of the afternoon, then venture back to camp for a hike and dinner as the sun sets. Even in the evening you can feel the heat radiating from the rocks and asphalt well into the night. We actually forced ourselves out of bed early on two mornings for pre-heat hikes/bike rides. It’s a gorgeous canyon, and we had a really special campsite, but so intensely hot this week.

Sept 13-15

After four nights of hot desert in St. George we find a cute little house in Orderville that will give us a window AC unit and internet. We are in! The next day we have plans, but never leave the house. Apparently we are wiped out! On our final day we head to Kanab and spend the day at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.

Best Friends takes care of 1600+ animals on 6,000 acres of canyonland – it’s truly amazing. They have their own RV Park, which would be worth staying in the next time we are through. You can volunteer to scratch cats for the day, or even borrow a dog for a hike or to stay overnight at your camp! Their goal is to get animals very comfortable with new humans and different situations so they are adoption-ready. They have an extensive rehab program for dogs that have been so abused or neglected that they can’t handle humans.

We also four-wheel just off the property to see a pueblo ruin and a hidden lake.

Sept 16-18

To Page, Arizona to catch a glimpse of the Glen Canyon Dam (and for a conference call), and then a long push to get to Durango, Colorado. We divert around a big thunderstorm, but inevitably it finds us and we are in a full deluge for our first night at a HTR Durango, a sweet and remote-feeling RV Camp about 15 minutes out of downtown Durango. They have full-on streaming internet wired from outer space. No heat radiating from rocks here – at night the temperature is in the mid-30’s.

Sept 19-21

We drive “The Million Dollar Highway” to Ouray, CO, elevation 7792 ft. Ouray (pronounced “you-ray”) is an old mining town nestled into a narrow canyon. The crazy thing is that our Forest Service campground, which is less than 1/2 mile from downtown as the crow flies, is almost 2000 ft higher than the town itself.

This is a town built on tourism, though it ain’t easy to get to, so these tourists are a more adventuresome stock: ice climbers, mountain bikers, long-haul hikers.

We are struck with how quickly we’ve moved from hot desert (at the “I hope we aren’t cooking our musical instruments” level hot) to the deluge of rain in Durango with near-freezing in the evening, to now having warm sunny days and feeling the air temp plummet as the sun sets beyond the canyon.

Next up we’ll begin a week of visits to a procession of dear friends further north. Then we begin our “Southern Decent” from 5000 ft down to the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans! More to come!