Day Eight
Monday, June 25, 2018
So Much Sand
We survived the night at Kodachrome Basin. The tent billowed and swayed in the wind quite a bit, and that sound of sand pitter-pattering on the rainfly continued a second night, but overall, it wasn’t a bad night. As promised, it was a new day with new adventures to come, the first being how to empty the fine sand from our tent so we could take it down.
After we were all dressed and our sleeping gear was put away, I attempted to scoop the sand out of our tent. I wish now that I would’ve scooped it into a baggie to save, but at the time, I just wanted it gone. After all, you’re not supposed to take rocks and I was so over the sand that I wasn’t about to keep it. I just needed it out of the tent.
Dried out wipes were all I could find for scooping/sweeping, unless I wanted to spoon it out…and I didn’t. The wipes worked good enough to get the majority of the sand out, but the inside of the tent still felt like sandpaper, and remained that way for the rest of the trip.
The Mystery Continues
Since we had parked on the tarp to keep it from blowing away, I moved the truck forward and we “admired” the tire marks now printed on what had been a brand new tarp. Also adding to this ever-growing, strange story, was the rainfly clip Joey found on the ground near the tent, and another missing tent stake Megan found near the little stream behind our campsite. We didn’t know we were missing that, so it was good that she had found it. How the heck did it get way back there?
While we were taking apart the tent poles, Joey and I discovered that one section of one of the poles had split open. What the heck had happened yesterday? Thankfully, I had been toting around duct tape wrapped around an old pen tube for years, and finally had a good use for it! I opted to fix it before packing up, considering our penchant for arriving at campsites in the dark.
Kodachrome Basin Visitor Center
We loaded up and then stopped at the visitor center. With our morning discoveries, I really wanted to talk to a ranger about what had happened. The kids had finished their Junior Ranger worksheets, so we wanted to turn those in, too. We started with them and then told the ranger about our campsite escapades, starting with the tarp. At first he wondered if we had any food in our tent that might have caused a critter to get a hold of the tarp and keep pawing at it. We hadn’t eaten anything more than a baggie of grapes in the tent this trip, so I knew it couldn’t be a “food in the tent” issue. There was no obvious hole in the ground that looked like pawing or digging happened either.
When we told him about the broken tent pole and clip, he told us that every night around 8-9pm, the wind comes up. He said that the basin is a giant curve that was created by cyclonic winds with speeds of 30-35 mph. He also said site 12 likely gets hit the worst, since it is at the furthest edge of the cyclone where it was the windiest. So basically, our tent weathered a mini-tornado while we were gone. It would’ve been nice to have read that little tidbit about the campground before booking two nights in a wind bowl.
At least that explained a lot of things…except how the tarp managed to get out from under the tent and how the foam mats got flipped over, while remaining in the order they had been stacked. The ranger thought the wind likely would’ve been strong enough to lift the tent if it was empty, giving the tarp enough room to come out. I’m not sure I’m buying that part of the story, but there really wasn’t any better explanation.
We may never know the whole story, but speculating about the possibilities was entertaining. The fact that our tent stood through cyclone winds without us was pretty amazing. I’ve always wondered if it actually stayed standing or if it got blown over and someone tipped it back up and staked it down in the corners. Either way, it added another memorable story to our list of memorable stories from this trip.
We asked the ranger where we could buy gallon jugs of water and he told us we could fill our jugs at the campground’s spigot, which was near our campsite. Another ranger walked in right about then and commented that it was real spring water. We drove back into the campground and proceeded to fill up 10 jugs. I don’t remember if it tasted any different than any other water, but at least we were stocked up!
My plan had included a possible morning hike at Kodachrome Basin, but after our night, and the previous day’s long hike, we were not especially excited to hike that day. Instead, we opted to take in the scenery on our way out of the park and get back on the road.
Scenic Byway 12
The plan for the day was to drive Scenic Byway 12 to Capitol Reef with a side trip on Burr Road to the slot canyon the Cannonville BLM ranger told us about. We stopped in Escalante at the BLM visitor center to turn in Junior Ranger books for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the kids received their badges for the books we picked up the day before. We also stopped at a tiny grocery store for sandwich supplies. Our cashier warned us about watching for cattle on the road in the open range areas and we did see a few cows along the way.
There were many overlooks for viewing the vast landscapes of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. We took our time and stopped at each one, which made the drive last several hours.
Scenic Byway 12 came highly recommended, but compared to the scenery we had viewed over the course of our trip, I would not consider it to be the best scenery we saw all week. I’m not saying it wasn’t pretty, but we may have looked at too many pretty rocks by that point. To this day, I think there are better drives in Utah, but it was worth doing it once. I was glad that I had abandoned a plan where we were going to take a day trip from Kodachrome Basin to Capitol Reef and back on highway 12. That would’ve been a long day.
Singing Canyon
Burr Trail, on the other hand, was spectacular. To get to the Singing Canyon, the ranger told us to turn on Burr Trail Road in Boulder, UT and go eleven miles. He made a point of telling me to check my mileage so I would know when eleven miles had passed, because this location was not marked at all. There would be a pullout…and possibly parked cars.
I carefully watched my odometer and sure enough, at mile eleven there was a pullout with a parked car. We were excited to hike another slot canyon since the Willis Creek slot canyon hadn’t worked out. This one looked beautiful going in. Only one other person was in the canyon while we were there and he was sitting on a ledge, probably hoping we’d leave quickly.
Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for us, this slot canyon is not very long, so our “hike” was over in under fifteen minutes. Had I known this canyon was so short, I’m not sure that I would’ve went 22 miles out of our way to visit, but it was neat and the drive was pretty in both directions. It was much easier to take in all of the scenery on the way back out when I wasn’t watching the odometer. When we reached Boulder again, we got back on highway 12 and resumed our drive to Capitol Reef.
Capitol Reef National Park
We reached the Capitol Reef Visitor Center just before 4pm and stopped by the ranger desk to pick up Junior Ranger books. Most parks require some sort of ranger program, so I asked what was available for those who are just passing through, which apparently was not the thing to ask these rangers.
Unlike most national parks, they would not allow the park film to count as a ranger talk. They said the park film will count as a ranger talk in their new books, but not these books, so the kids would need to write three questions to ask a ranger instead. Weird, but ok, no problem, we like talking to rangers. They also needed to do all of the pages of the books…and they were closing at 5pm, so we’d need to mail the books in to get the badges. Ugh.
We have had other rangers who would allow me to take the badges along if I promised not to hand them out until the books were done, but when I asked about that, these rangers said that was not allowed. It’s not cheap to mail two Junior Ranger books, so we decided to watch the park film while the kids worked on the books, since we like park films anyway. Personally, I like park films for the opportunity to take a quick afternoon catnap after driving all day, and this one did the trick!
Many of the Junior Ranger books from different parks have similar general questions about animals and leaving no trace, so the kids were able to get most of them done during the film, and finish up with park specific questions in the museum displays. By the time we were done, a different ranger was at the desk.
I don’t think he was too excited about handing out Junior Ranger badges either, but the kids each asked their three questions and he looked over their books. Megan asked about a hike we could do and Joey asked about where Capitol Reef fit in compared to the Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce Canyon. That discussion must have helped somewhat because the ranger finally seemed satisfied that they had done enough to be sworn in as Junior Rangers and receive their badges in person.
I’m not sure if this was one of those parks that prefers Junior Rangers who are little kids, or if we just arrived at a bad time. The visitor center was fairly busy, so who knows? I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but between several rangers, they were not an especially personable bunch that day. The kids did everything that was asked of them to earn their badges in person, so the whole encounter seemed odd compared to our experiences in other national parks.
The Famous Pie of Capitol Reef National Park
At least there was still the possibility of getting the famous Gifford Homestead pie, so that was our next stop. We were in luck! They had plenty of pies left, so we chose cherry and paid our $6. Normally, I would not pay $6 for a tiny pie, but we had been looking forward to this stop ever since we found out there would be homemade pie in a national park! We had ours wrapped so we could save it for dessert later and then set off on the scenic drive through Capitol Reef.
Capitol Reef National Park’s scenic drive was gorgeous. I had hoped to hike to Hickman Bridge, but it was about 95 degrees outside and way too hot for a hike. The ranger had told us about the Grand Wash being in the shade so when I saw a sign for that, I turned off on the dirt road to go take a look at the trailhead. Unfortunately, the dirt road was so badly rutted and rocky that I had to turn around. I’m not a huge fan of flat tires and this particular drive looked like just the place to get one. No, thank you!
It did seem odd that the ranger would send us somewhere with poor road conditions, but he wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine, so I figured maybe the road was actually considered safe, just not the one for me.
There were some interesting signs posted on a few gates covering mine entrances. Apparently, uranium had been mined there in the past and could be harmful if you got close. That seemed creepy! We got back to the scenic drive, turned around when the pavement ended, and drove back out.
Grand Wash Trail…and More Sand
As we were heading toward the park exit, I saw another sign for the Grand Wash, complete with a pullout to park. Ahh, this was probably what the ranger had meant. Nice of him to mention which end to look for, but I suppose he was thinking we were not even going to check out the scenic drive. We had, after all, told him we were just passing through.
We decided to give it a try, but by that point of the day (and trip) we were just not into hiking. It was hot and the walk to get to the good part was in full sun. And the trail was covered in that same sugar sand that had plagued us at the campground for the last two nights.
Sugar sand is hard to walk in, which would’ve made it take forever…time that we did not have. It looked like it would be a neat hike if we hadn’t already hiked so many miles during our trip, and if we could’ve started at about 5:30am instead of 5:30pm. We hiked far enough to count it as a hike and turned around.
This was not exactly how I had envisioned our visit to Capitol Reef National Park, but no campsites were available, so it was time to move on. For anyone wondering why we even bothered to visit if we were only going to give it a couple hours, that hadn’t been the original plan. In a perfect world, we would not have needed to scoop sand out of our tent, repair a tent pole, fill ten gallons of water at a spigot, or chat with park rangers about whatever had happened to our tent the night before while we were gone. I knew highway 12 was supposed to take two to three hours, but it took us more like five, plus we made an unplanned side trip to Singing Canyon and stopped for groceries along the way. I had only planned to “sample” Capitol Reef for the afternoon, to see if we’d want to make it a real visit someday, and we did just that. We experienced the park film, the scenic drive, a walk in the sand, and the famous pie.
Stan’s Burger Shak
We had camped at Goblin Valley State Park the prior year and had a great campsite, so it was an easy choice to head there for the night. On the way there, we stopped in Hanksville, UT. Stan’s Burger Shak has the best burgers and fries for being in the middle of nowhere of Utah! The place is run by all teens who get to decide the menu, as well as do all the cooking. We took our burgers to go and they were delicious!
Goblin Valley State Park
Since I had a cell signal, I called Goblin Valley to make sure they had sites and the ranger confirmed that indeed they did. He gave instructions on how to pay if he was gone by the time we arrived. He was just packing up to go home when we pulled in, so he gave me the numbers of the open sites to choose from. We paid and drove around to check out our options. We had site 11 last year, but it was occupied. We could’ve taken site 10 next to it, but that wasn’t tucked back in like site 11 had been, so we chose site 3 for the interesting formation close behind it.
After setting up our tent and throwing all the sleep stuff inside, we drove down to watch the sunset over the “goblins” and eat our Gifford Homestead pie. The cherry pie was excellent and there was plenty of pie for the three of us to share. Pie at sunset turned out to be a combo I could not have planned better if I had tried. I wish I had thought to take a picture of our pie, but I have no pie pics!
Once the sun set and we enjoyed the lingering glow over the goblins for a bit, we drove back to the shower house where we had to wait for showers to open up. I reorganized the truck while I waited and eventually we were all showered up for the night and could go back to our tent. By that time, it was dark and quiet around the campground. We had left the rainfly off for the night, so we admired the dark sky and stars through the top of the tent. I studied the Utah and Colorado maps for a bit to decide on a route home and then we went to sleep.
We have three more days of adventures to go on this road trip…and two more nights in our gritty tent, so be sure to subscribe to find out where we go on our way home!
Got any theories on what happened to our tent? Leave a comment below!