August 8, 2017 All around the gorge

August 8, 2017

My paternal human caught a mousie with one of his toys!  How did he do that?  Then he didn’t even eat it!  What’s with that?

My morning walk took me across the meadow behind the RV park.  Deer hang here.  A little boy tried to feed a deer some fritos.  The deer took one and that was enough.  She split!  The little boy tried to chase her!  I wandered around the campground next door.  There is a threat of rain later today, but for now, we are set to explore.

We packed a lunch and the first order of business was to secure a campsite for when we leave the RV park.  It is a primitive site – no RV hookups or wifi, so we will be off the grid until at least Saturday.  Then we headed up the west side of the gorge.  The road around the gorge really does not give many views of the water.  You have to take side roads to lookout points.  We went to the Dowd Lookout point about 4 miles down a dirt road.  It has epic views of the rocky canyon to the south, and the less dramatic formations to the north.  The south looks like Lake Powell with pine trees, while the north looks like the desert of Lake Mohave.  One big difference from Lake Powell is the temperature.  At Lake Powell in the summer when it rains, the temperatures drop from 95 to maybe 80.  Here, the temperatures fall from 75 to 50!  And from what I hear, the water temp is quite cold!  But we see people boating and towing water toys. 

We found a little dirt road that looked like a spot we might boondock with Hannah.  We headed down the red road, but it made a rather sharp Uturn.  It had a nice turnaround spot.  A small trail led to a stream that would be lots of fun to fish.  We decided this was not for Hannah when we tried to make the Uturn going back and needed to go into 4wd to get up the hill.  Too bad, it was so pretty here.

Continuing up the west side, we detoured to the Sheep Creek loop.  It veers though meadows surrounded by pines and aspens.  We make a few turns and then it hit us!  A panorama off the eye candy charts!  To the right, the mountain is prairie scrub.  To the left, the mountain is heavily forested with pines, aspens and other mountain trees.  In front of us is an enormous range of geological expressions of beauty!  The mountains are rugged and there are a variety of formations.  Some have wavy folds, others have upward striations.  And they are tall – 15000 feet!  This area is known for its geological diversity and it certainly was a highlight for us.  As we descended, we saw some bighorn sheep.  Hmmm, could that be how the canyon got its name?

We begrudgingly left the magnificence of the loop to continue up the west side of the gorge.  After about a mile, we crest a hill to see plains across the horizon.  Like a lightswitch, the terrain switched to desert.  Coming into the town of Manila, the green farms enhanced the landscape.  But once we crossed the border into Wyoming, all beauty in the landscape ceased to exist!  We checked out the Lucerne marina and campground.  Antelope roamed as if they owned the place.  It must get quite windy here as each campsite had windbreaks around the picnic tables.

We were told that this part of the gorge was kind of blah.  Kind of?  Not only was it blah, it was a big bag of blah.  It was so blah that the blah-o-meter could not even register!  It looked like Lake Mohave, which is fine if you are in a boat, waterskiing in warm glassy water.  The beautiful cliffs and canyons of the southern gorge are gone.  It is DESERT.  And we have about 45 more miles of it till we hit the town of Green River.

We fueled up in Green River then headed the few miles on I80 to so that we could head down the east side of the gorge.  We ventured on a dirt road for about 10 miles thinking we might get somewhere.  We didn’t, so we came back.  Although it is still desert, there are rock formations and some green scrub making it a bit more interesting.  We checked out the FireHole marina – could have been Lake Mohave. 

When it started to rain, we got back onto 191 heading south.  The prairie turned green, and there were rolling hills.  It definitely was much prettier on this side of the gorge.  But you never see the gorge along the way until you actually cross the Flaming Gorge Dam.

Back to Hannah, Rudy was waiting.  No mice in any of the traps…  We watched the deer in the meadow behind us.