Our roadtrips rarely go like I envision them. This trip was no exception. In December of 2019, I reserved us our own giant rock formation in the Needles District Campground in Canyonlands National Park in Utah. That rock in the yellow circle was supposed to be ours for two nights on a June 2020 road trip!
Then COVID-19 happened and travel was shut down almost everywhere. Surely, it would be over by June…right? As the weeks creeped closer to our trip dates, the National Park Service was cancelling reservations two weeks at a time. I found myself with my fingers crossed that we could go, while also hoping the NPS would cancel our reservations so I wouldn’t have to decide if traveling to Utah was the right thing to do.
Our numbers in South Dakota were still under 800 cases for the whole state, but I watched the numbers everywhere else growing day by day on the national COVID-19 website. Utah’s numbers spiked right about the time that I received the email cancelling our reservation. It was disappointing, but I was relieved at the same time. I wasn’t worried about catching anything while camping and hiking outside in a remote park, but southern Utah is a long way from home. I also wasn’t convinced that gas stations and public restrooms wouldn’t be our downfall if we went that far. Thankfully, someone else decided for us, so we were not tempted to find out.
What could we do instead?
I wasn’t ready to give up on a road trip just yet. We had been at home since mid-March and I knew that we would not pose a threat of spreading this strange disease. Our only in-person contact with the outside world was the person loading our weekly Walmart grocery pickups into the back end of the Durango. We didn’t go anywhere, but we needed to get out of the house. With the low number of cases in South Dakota, I wasn’t concerned about the first four hundred miles heading west. We could be across the state with one gas stop in the middle of nowhere. But where could we go that wouldn’t have a bunch of people?
I mentioned our dilemma to my brother Tim, and he suggested one of his snowmobiling places, the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Wyoming also had low numbers, and we could get there in a day’s drive, with just a couple stops for gas and bathroom breaks along the way. We needed to stay away from other people and this seemed like the perfect “under the radar” place to explore!
How could we avoid other people?
Since we had such little contact with other people, I was more concerned about us catching this plague than spreading it, so I ordered some new gear. Instead of enjoying a meal each day at local restaurants, I would cook for us on a Coleman single burner butane camp stove. There were conflicting reports of bathrooms not being stocked with toilet paper (or perhaps the toilet paper in high demand was being stolen?) so I also ordered a popup shower tent, a five-gallon bucket, and a toilet seat that fit the bucket. With some garbage bags and wood pellets, we had our own personal portable porta-potty! Perhaps I went a little overboard on that one, but I pictured us setting it up instead of using rest areas. We could pay at the pump for gas, and tent camping doesn’t usually involve much interaction with other people, so this plan seemed safe enough to actually pull it off.
What’s for supper?
My next challenge was figuring out what we’d eat for a week. I had always brought along bars for breakfast, and various cold lunch options, but not cooking anything on the road was my vacation. I love to cook, but I’m not a meal planner or a recipe follower. I cook whatever ingredients I have on hand into something that sounds good that day, which was not a plan that would work for suppers on the road. I made a list of the easiest possible meals to make:
Hot dogs and baked beans
Roast beef sandwiches topped with sautéed onions and bell peppers
Hot ham and cheese sandwiches
Beans and hamburger
Calzones stuffed with jalapeño breakfast sausage and mozzarella cheese
If you’re thinking “one of these things is not like the others” you’d be right. Ever since we ate calzones in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I wanted to try making them. To this day, they are probably the most ridiculous food I cook on the road, but they are so good and they are a treat I only make while camping!
Everything about this road trip was going to be different than those we had enjoyed the last several years. Our usual road trip to the desert, through a variety of places, in multiple states, was being replaced by a week in a somewhat obscure mountain range, only a day’s drive from home. I spent a day cooking and freezing foods to take along because we wouldn’t be enjoying any little mom and pop restaurants along the way. They probably weren’t even open if we had wanted to eat at them because so many places were closed. We felt the need to take along our own porta-potty…and so much hand sanitizer. Did I mention there would be no desert for us? We love the desert, but this change in plans was a good excuse to try something new. This was going to be a very different type of adventure for us! Read on to find out how the first day went!
Day One
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Driving Across South Dakota
Departure time: 10:50am. Not as early as I had hoped, but what else is new? Siri said we’d be there by 5:40pm and since we weren’t planning on stopping, it seemed doable.
Traffic on I90 was heavy. Road construction season was in high gear, slowing our trek across the state. We rented a Honda CRV for the trip and that made the usual boring drive a little more entertaining while I figured out the features of the 17 years newer vehicle technology. I remember thinking I might be too old for this new of a car!
We saw a ton of RVs and tried counting them but that was like trying to count the never-ending Wall Drug signs in SD; there were just too many! Even with so much traffic, the Chamberlain rest area wasn’t busy when we stopped, so we decided it was safe enough to go inside and not use our new porta-potty if we didn’t have to.
Rain, Rain, Go Away
I’ve never seen such huge lightning bolts to the ground as the ones we saw just before we stopped at the Wyoming Welcome Center for a quick break. I asked the maintenance man if he knew the forecast for the weather happening in the west. He said we were in a severe thunderstorm warning until 9pm and that the storm was over Keyhole State Park at the moment. We’d be driving right into it. Goodie.
We weren’t back on the road long before meeting up with that storm. It was raining pretty hard when the car in front of me pulled into one of the many parking areas on the side of the road. I thought it wasn’t that bad…and then just like that, I couldn’t see the road right in front of me. We couldn’t see anything but the heavy rain. I inched along with my flashers on, catching a glimpse of the lines here and there until I noticed there seemed to be an extra wide shoulder. I pulled off to the side and peeled my white knuckles from the steering wheel to wait out the storm. And then it hailed on us.
The hail and heavy rain didn’t last long and we started seeing headlights again. There must have been a lot of other folks who had stopped, as well, because we hadn’t seen anyone go by for the five minutes we had sat there waiting. When the rain let up enough and the radar looked like the worst had passed, we continued on.
A Police Escort
The rest of the drive to Buffalo went fast. We were followed through town by a friendly policeman. I needed to make a left turn and thought I was pulling into a turning lane until he pulled up in front of me with his blinker on in the next lane. Oops! He must have seen this before in this spot because he stuck his arm out the window as he stopped. When the light turned green, he turned and I followed him. When we got around the corner, he gave me a thumbs up and we both continued down the same road. At the edge of town, he pulled off to the side and waved as we went by.
We made it to the mountains! We couldn’t see them through the fog, but they were there somewhere. It wasn’t long before we started seeing campground signs.
I had planned to camp in South Fork Campground on the first night. Our camp host, Debbie, didn’t know if she had any sites left, but she said if we were in a tent to be sure to walk across the bridge to check for open sites in the tent only area, which was what we did. We had three sites to choose from and we picked site 12, which offered the most separation from the other tent sites.
We quickly set up the tent and paid for our site. After eight hours on the road, we chose hot dogs for supper because they would be fast. That turned out to be a good idea because it started to rain while they were cooking. We took our pot of hot dogs to the truck to eat them where it was dry.
I’m not sure how long we waited for the rain to stop, but we people-watched while we waited. Not all of the fourteen campsites were full, so it felt very safe to be there. As it turned out, vault toilets where only one person can be inside at a time actually seemed better than a restroom with a row of stalls, plus they were cleaning them every two hours, according to the chart on the door. These vault toilets were probably the cleanest and freshest smelling restroom facilities we’ve ever experienced! When the rain finally let up, we hauled our sleeping gear to the tent to settle in for the night. We fell asleep to the sound of rain pitter pattering on the tent.
Our mountain adventures begin on day two, so be sure to subscribe to get the next post in your inbox!