It was a chilly night in the tent. White Bridge Campground is situated in the Dixie National Forest at about 7900 feet of elevation and the nearby creek was running pretty fast with mountain snowmelt. The creek had been nice to listen to while going to sleep and again when waking up in the morning. We rarely camp near lakes, but if we can’t camp in the desert, sleeping next to a creek comes in a close second choice!
Day Nine
Friday, June 7, 2019
Dixie National Forest
White Bridge Campground
Have a listen…
Isn’t that such a peaceful sound? Some may wonder why we’d want to sleep in a tent while on vacation and this is why…to hear the nature sounds, take in the fresh air, and sleep in epic places where there are no hotels. What’s not to love about that?
While studying the map the night before, I discovered that we were only twenty miles away from Cedar Breaks National Monument! The park had been closed on our way past the exit on Interstate 15 earlier in our trip, but it had been a week since then, so I asked a guy out walking his dog if he knew if it was open yet. He said that it had opened the day before, but today was the first official fee day. No problem! We had the pass, so off we went up the mountains to a park we didn’t think we’d get to visit on this trip!
Cedar Breaks National Monument
The higher we climbed, the more snow we saw along the sides of the roads. By the time we reached the visitor center, the snow was taller than a six foot Joey. No wonder they hadn’t been open the week before! Apparently, they had had a late season storm that dumped quite a bit of snow on them right before they were supposed to open for the season.
The park rangers at Cedar Breaks must have been pretty excited about their first official day of visitors because they had a ranger talk about geology planned for the morning, shortly after we had arrived. The kids had picked up their Junior Ranger books and worked on them for a bit until the ranger talk started and then we went outside.
The geology talk was very interesting! We learned that we were at the highest point of all the locations on the “Grand Staircase” of the Colorado Plateau and that we had come from the park with the lowest point, the Grand Canyon. We chatted with the ranger for a bit after her talk was done and she was pretty excited to find out that her geology talk had tied everything together for us with all of the places we had been and that we were finishing at the top, in her park! Here’s an image I found from geofile.net that represents all of the layers, along with a map showing the location.
After the ranger talk, the kids finished up their Junior Ranger books and we found another park ranger to go over them with us. His Junior Ranger Pledge included the line about bringing cookies the next time we visit. In all of the places we’ve visited, Craters of the Moon and Cedar Breaks have been the only two that have had park rangers who wish for cookies. I’ve always thought if we went back to either one, I’d pick them up a pack of Oreos to deliver.
Meet Penelope
For some unknown reason, Megan has a penchant for the stuffed versions of wee rodents. (Thankfully, just the stuffed ones!) This one is a pika, which she fell in love with the instant she saw her. Penelope joined Karl, the Kangaroo Rat that we found in the Painted Desert Visitor Center the year before. Penelope and Karl still travel with us on every road trip. At least they are well-behaved rodents!
We really enjoyed our time at Cedar Breaks National Monument. With all of the snow, though, we were limited on what we could do. There were no trails open to hike on so we just stopped at the various viewpoints and took a lot of photos. The canyon was beautiful with the snow settled into all of the crevices of red sandstone. It’s what I would imagine Bryce Canyon to look like with snow, only we could have a look at this in the summer!
After Cedar Breaks, we stopped for a grocery resupply at the Walmart in Richfield, UT. The cooler was no longer cold so we needed some ice, along with snacks and lunch foods. After spending probably too much time poking ice cubes into gallon jugs, we were back on the road.
Side note: We use cooler bags, so dumping a bag of ice into a cooler does not work for us. We start off a trip with gallon jugs that are frozen and those will last several days if we are careful about how much the cooler bags get opened. After a more recent trip where we had to do this again, I have decided that dumping the ice into ziploc bags that are doubled might work better than poking ice cubes into water bottles. I also have a coconut oil jar that might work even better, but we haven’t been on a long enough trip in the heat to need more ice along the way.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that Dinosaur National Monument would be our next stop. It had been on my radar for a possible stop if we had gone through Monument Valley and up through Moab, and we could cut through the Flaming Gorge on the way home. Since their campground was a first come, first served campground at the time, I called them to find out the likelihood of getting a campsite for the night. They said they rarely fill up…famous last words.
Because I like to drive on as many different roads as I can on a roadtrip, so that I can highlight them on my Rand McNally Road Atlas when I get home, we took Highway 89 north to Thistle. Then we took Highway 6 and stopped at the Tie Fork Rest Area along the way. It was a fun stop with a train engine and a picnic area that was set up to resemble part of a roundhouse.
Somewhere between Colton, UT and Helper, UT, in Price Canyon, our push to get to Dinosaur National Monument came to a halt. We were stacked up miles deep in line for an hour…that seemed to go on for an eternity. We had just gone past the sign for Price Canyon Recreation Area and could’ve gone back there for the night to camp, but I had it in my mind that we should keep going…even though it was already 6:45pm when we stopped.
Eventually, we made it out and drove past an RV that looked like it must have been in flames, causing our delay. At least we got stopped in a beautiful area, but as much as I love driving through beautiful canyons, they can sure be a bottleneck for a good hour or more if anything goes wrong.
I’d like to take Highway 191 between Helper, UT and Duchesne, UT again because it looked like it might have been really pretty, if we hadn’t been in such a hurry. It was just after 8pm when these photos were taken, and we still had another hour and a half to go before we reached the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument.
Dinosaur National Monument
We entered the national monument after dark and without a campsite…and we were not alone in our drive toward Green River Campground. When we arrived, an RV was just ahead of us and the campground host was out talking to the driver. At least we didn’t need to disturb anyone to inquire about a campsite.
The RV made a loop around and left, which was not a good sign. Sometimes tents can fit where RVs can’t so when it was our turn, we asked about tent sites and learned that the last campsite had just been filled a little earlier. The campground host didn’t know what was going on and mentioned that they rarely fill up and tonight, he could’ve used a few more campsites.
He was super-friendly, though, and suggested that we could use the restrooms in the campground and then follow the RV to a nearby dispersed campsite just outside the park boundary. He gave us instructions that were something along the lines of crossing a cattle grate, but if we reached a fork in the road, we had gone too far. Apparently, there’s a strip of BLM land in between a little jog in the park boundary. He said he had already sent a couple other campers out that way but there should be room for three of us. He said we could come back to the campground in the morning if we wanted to use their facilities.
We stopped for a quick restroom break before leaving the campground and by that time, the RV we were supposed to follow was long gone and it was super dark. We talked it over and none of us were all that keen on finding a dispersed campsite with two other campers in the dark…sooooo…we left the park in search of something else. There were two state parks nearby, along with a KOA in Vernal, so we decided to go check those.
The Search for a Campsite
I think if I would’ve had a cell phone signal to check the mileage, I never would’ve left the park, but in my mind, those state parks didn’t seem that far away. We went back to Vernal, which was a 20-mile drive by itself. Steinaker State Park was just 4 miles north of town, but they had a big sign near the driveway declaring the campground was full. Darn! From there, we went another 7 miles to Red Fleet State Park, which was also full.
Back to Vernal we went to check out the KOA in town. I’m not sure if they were full or not, but I know I checked their night registration board and we could not camp there, either because they didn’t allow you to come in after hours or because it was full. Now what to do?
We drove past the hotels and debated just getting a cheap hotel for the night, but they were mostly all full, too. We circled the Walmart parking lot, not really wanting to camp there, but we needed a place to stop to figure out what to do. No overnight camping is allowed in the Vernal Walmart parking lot, so that settled that question.
We decided that the only option we had left was to go back to to the park and try to find the dispersed campsite that the camp host had told us about. I looked it up on freecampsites.net and it got good reviews. There were a few different options, but we decided to just go where he had told us to go. We had driven around for almost two hours at this point.
We stopped at a rest area along the way, since we would not have any facilities at the dispersed site, and drove back through the very dark park. I couldn’t remember exactly what the camp host had told us, but I knew that if we spotted RVs on the side of the road, that was probably it. After another 28 miles, we made it to the dispersed campsite and pulled in off to the side of the two RVs already parked in the spot.
Side note: In an ideal world, this would not be considered good dispersed camping etiquette to camp that close to other folks in a dispersed site, but since the campground host had told us there was room for three of us, I felt it was ok for the night. We had no other options.
It was after midnight and we were starving because we hadn’t had time to stop for supper earlier. Luckily, we had just bought snacks, so we had been snacking along the way. We ate another snack and tried to get comfortable in the seats we had already been sitting in since 9am. We were too tired to set up the tent and really didn’t feel comfortable setting it up so close to a couple of RVs in what was basically a dirt pull-off on the side of the road.
Instead, we put the reflector in the front window and hung stuff in the side windows so nobody would see us sleeping in the morning….and then we tried to go to sleep.
What a way to end the day! I mapped this little jaunt and we went another 75 miles to end up 5 miles from the campground we had wanted to camp at.
Hindsight is 20/20
I will admit that driving around to find out if other campgrounds would have a spot, when the one that said they rarely fill up was full…was probably not the smartest decision I’ve ever made on a road trip. I don’t know what we had against dispersed camping at the time, other than we had never done it and it sounded scarier than driving around in the dark looking for a legit campsite.
I wished more than one time that night, that we would’ve given more consideration to the campground we saw in Price Canyon…six hours earlier. We could’ve enjoyed our drive to Dinosaur a lot more in the morning. Unfortunately, hindsight is still 20/20 and we had been banking on the words “rarely fill” to mean a campsite would be waiting for us if we kept going. You just never know how a day on the road will end, but at least we had a safe place to rest for the night…unlike the folks whose RV went up in flames on the side of a road through a canyon!
I wish I could say that looking for a campsite late at night has never happened again…but that’s a story for another day.
Please subscribe to find out what our first dispersed campsite looked like the next morning! Did we survive the night in our Durango? Find out in the next installment of this adventure!