October 31, 2023 Moving On

I have a new way to charm my humans.  I use my tired meow.  It isn’t meow, it is mrai and I stretch my front paws.  Sometimes I stretch out the mrai… mraaaiii.  Oh I am so cute!

Today I took a wee walk around the campground.  Some of the spots have teensy trails down to the river.  You may need to bushwhack just a little but it was fun checking it out… in my arctic wear.  It was 33 this morning outside.  Spouse kept it at 50 inside till we got up then got the heat going.

We are planning on moving on today, maybe heading to Monticello and the Needles district of Canyonlands about 60 miles south.  We had a bit of trouble hooking to the hitch, but finally got it.  We stopped at City Farm and filled our propane tanks and dumped Artee. We were thinking of staying in an RV park, but we put some fresh water in just in case.

We headed south on Hwy. 191.  The La Sal mountains with their beautiful white tops are on our left.  We are in a valley with grazing grounds and rock formations.  At one point, we passed ‘A HOLE N THE ROCK’.  I know because it is painted like a neon sign on the rock and has a jeep perched perilously at the top.  Some tourist thing, not sure what it was, but we moved on.  We saw a sign for Canyonland Needles.  Hmm, let’s take that road.  It looks to be going into the back country.  There is a little sign for ‘glamping at Needles Outpost’.  Based on the mileage, it looked like that was just a mile before the park.   Let’s try this and see where it goes.

Rocks to the left, rocks to the right, and plains in the middle.  We stopped at some of the rock formations to watch the rock climbers.  These were serious climbers.  They had to climb a nasty hill just to get to the point where they could rock climb.  And, they have to do it carrying their gear.  We saw several hovering in cracks about 100 feet high.  It kind of reminded me of how algae eaters attach to the glass of a fish tank! One was in a spiderman costume, another had dragon fly wings. 

There are a few roads that lead to campgrounds.  They are gravel roads.  We have learned to think before we go off the main road as we seem to get into trouble.  It is an easy windy road, but we do have to watch the overhead.  At one point, the rock overhang would easily attack Artee if we did not go in the opposite lane.  Beyond that, it was ok, and very pretty.

At mile 33, we see what we think is the campground.  We pull in and see that the owners are running errands and will be back in an hour or so.  There are after hour instructions on how to get a space.  We got out and started walking around.  We are in the middle of nowhere with killer views.  The road is dirt and not graded very well.  Many of the sites looked large enough.  Some were not level.  This is definitely a primitive campground, but not in the BLM way!

We saw a couple of spaces we liked so we went and got Artee.  We tried to get into space 19.  It was large enough, but there was no swing room up front so it was impossible to get into position to back up.  We were able to get into one but it was too narrow.  When we opened the slider, it went all the way to the fire pit.  We tried another that was huge.  No swing room.  Even the pull-thru spot would make things very un-level.  Hmmm…..  There was hardly anybody here so we had our pick.  We went to the small group site.  We fit, and maybe we could take that given there were very few patrons.  Caleb, the shopkeeper let us have it.  Perfect!  After 2 hours of messing around, we had our spot we were level and we were happy! 

We disconnected and headed into the National Park which is right outside the campground.  It was after 4, and the visitor center was closed, even though it said it was open till 5.  We did a quick cruise.

This part of Canyonlands is a bit different than the northern part.  Here, there are the grazing grounds, but you can tell from the moment you enter that there is majestic rock formations all around.  The needles are a bunch of spires in the distance.  There are rock walls like a fortress, there are mesas, and buttes.  I know you are probably tired of this, but the wide open spaces with all the decorations are amazing.  But, we will be back tomorrow to do some hiking.