Thursday, September 8, 2016 Too many highways to count

Thursday, September 8, 2016

ME-OWT!  I will make sure my humans cannot ignore me.  I will paw at them.  I will sit in their food.  ME-OWT!  My paternal human lets me lick this ice cold thing on a stick.  I will be in their faces until they let ME-OWT!

It is cold.  Well, we are at a ski resort at 8000 feet, so it should not come as a surprise that it gets cold even though the calendar still says it is summer.  I watched deer cruise the parking lot last night, and oh what a night sky!  Although this place is not my style for an RV park, I love the location and the fact that we are essentially all alone, except for the workers starting to get the mountain ready for ski season.

After my walk, we ready Hannah for her next adventure.  We decided to go back to take a round about way to get to Ogden by going to Bear Lake, Garden City to be exact, and catch 30 going south, to 16 to 39.

As we go south along Bear Lake, more road kill.  We saw a lot of road kill including a dead coyote right next to a dead deer.   I wonder what that story was all about...  As we go south, the mountains become more arid.  We climb a bit and as we leave the lake and turn through the mountains, we are in the middle of the high desert.  For miles, it looks like we could be driving up to Mammoth.  As we get near Randolph, there are a few farms and cattle ranches.  We turn on 16 passing some more farms and more high desert.  We are starting to see Utah's famous red rock beneath the desert sage and ponderosa pines.  Turning on to 39, we climb. 

We are not in rugged mountains.  The pass goes to 9000 feet, but they are giant rolling hills, meadow mountains if you will.  And it is a stunningly beautiful pass.  The valleys are not flat valleys but rolling hills with various colors and textures, overlapping one another.  A swath of pines, with a patch of brown, then a ribbon of aspens.  The undergrowth is in various stages of fall color regalia.  There are miles and miles of aspens.

We see a hunter in camo with a bow.  It looks like there are hunter camps on some of the back roads where we can see through the trees.  As we descend, we check out a few campgrounds along a creek.  Hannah could fit in a few spots.  It is very pretty.  We come out near I84 at the Snow Basin ski area. 

We try to stay off major highways, but there is no way to avoid it where we are going.  I84 west to 89 south, to I15 south, to I215 south, to I80 west, to 36 south.  I know you are thinking, where the hell are they going?  We are headed to the Great Basin national park in Nevada, right across the Utah border.  We heard it was worth seeing so...  it is kind of not too far out of our way, sort of, maybe.  We have another week before we need to be in St. George, so this looks like it should work, right?  Supposedly, the ride along I80 at this point is scenic.  It does go along the Great Salt Lake, but it looks Nevada brown to me. 

Once we turn south on 36, there are some decent size towns.  We stop for a bite.  I check out the campground situation...  Huh?  There aren't any... at least any that will take an RV.  Really?  I check, I check, I check...  The next place we can stay is in Delta, 98 miles south.  Oh well, we have gone longer than we like to go, but we should be there by about 4:30.

The road is boring.  We could be driving to Las Vegas at one point, Kansas at another and Iowa at another.  For about 80 miles, it pegs the bore-o-meter.  Then some farms pop up and it gets more interesting.  We see some major dunes.  They are the Little Sahara Dunes.  Looks like a great ATV area.

We finally get to Delta, and find the RV park.  We almost fit in our spot but that is the way it is.  It has shade!  I am back in my shorts and it feels good!

But the wi-fi is slow...  But it is great if you like the sound and feel of trains, smell of cattle when the wind shifts, and the bright lights of the gas stations across the street.