Wednesday was kind of tiring.  I chose a route that required a lot of driving, but it was through the most interesting landscapes you can imagine – sometimes these southern Utah landscapes really do verge on the unimaginable.  And I ended up having a really nice evening.  I had been in a rodent-induced spiral of sleep-deprived negativity, and what seemed to break me out of it was getting off the road and jumping into Lake Powell.  Things have been getting better ever since.

Best is that I seem to be mouse-less, without having had to commit violence! I had both the nice trap and the mean trap deployed, with murder in my heart, but no mousie!  My theory is that I did a good job of hiding my food.  I created such a barren foodscape in the van that my furry pal deserted me for the splendors of the Red Rock Steakhouse dumpster!  On earlier nights his outside menu was pine cones and seeds, so he might as well hang with the van and see if he can steal another cashew bit from a trap.  But tonight his other option is a full-on dumpster!  So, bye bye to the metal box with the large yelling mammal (me!) in it. My feelings are a little hurt that he could be so fickle!

So I was able to sleep through the night for the first time in four days, and did not wake up worrying that someone was shitting in my electrical wiring.  That’s a better start to any day right there!

My little restaurant think they’re a steakhouse, so I invest in the steak and eggs – quite good, for a less than I would pay for patty sausage at Pegs in Reno.

The drive from Hanksville to Torrey might be the most interesting of all for the connoisseur of crazy rocks.  First time out, one is much more taken with the Boulder to Escalante run.  But really, that is all just a bunch of well-sculptured limestone.  Very dramatic, but kinda all the same.  This stuff,  whatever it is, is more like chunks of the walls of Death Valley picked out and dumped in piles right here along Route 24.  First time through you zoom right past it because it looks like mining waste, but in fact it is gray dirt or green dirt or red dirt or lavender dirt because God threw in a little copper or iron or magnesium to make it that way and left it huge untidy piles right here. No human intervention at all except to cut a road through it.  This was I think my third time through here in the last … 16 years (first time on my Autodesk sabbatical in 1995), and this time I finally think I got it and started to savor how unusual and bizarre it really is.

Turn left (south) at Torrey, and get a little break from the just outrageous scenery.  About 40 miles of lovely green mountains.  Dixie National Forest, pines and aspens, streams, vistas, campgrounds.  Very pleasant driving … except for the bane of this particular year’s trip, German’s driving rented RV’s.  No dude, it is not OK to just stop in the middle of the parking lot and block everyone’s cars because you really want to see the vista.  I seem to have come the absolute peak time to visit here, and there are huge, unwieldy touring vehicles everywhere.

Anyway eventually I come down out of the mountains to remote Boulder Utah.  Take a right to resume the eastward trek through Escalante (see above) to Bryce.  The town of Tropic looks on the map like the gateway to Bryce, but it’s too far away in temperature and elevation.  Tropic is rather .. tropical for Utah.  West of it you can see high above you the hoodoo formations that are the signature of Bryce.  Then you realize that at Bryce you are looking down on the these formations.  So starts quite a long climb.  At the actual gateway to Bryce (I remember when it was only a gas station and a crappy motel – now it’s a glittering tourist complex), you are at 9000′.

Tonight here at Bryce I’m having the night I planned and wanted to have at Yellowstone!  I got a non-crappy campsite inside the park and was able to walk from that campsite to interesting things.  I got there about 5, hung out till about 6:30 and walked east towards the lodge and the all-important Rim walk.

Friday

Do a little more rim hiking, grab a little wifi in the lodge, and it’s bye,bye Bryce.  This time I got tricked by my research.  Yelp indicated a restaurant in Panguitch (rhymes with sandwich, they say…) which sounded good, so I drove past 2-3 (unlisted) likely spots to get to it, and when I got there it was exceedingly average, sucky even.  It’s hard to know when to follow your gut or when to follow Yelp.

A very pretty drive up the Sevier River Valley, with Mystic Hot Springs as my destination. There was much less to the town of Monroe that I hoped, so I have to decide whether to drive 12 miles to a grocery or have leftover night.  A long afternoon nap decided the issue, leftovers it is!

Mystic Hot Springs is a pretty trippy place!  The main building is a shambles.  The fellow behind the desk was nice.  The camping area is back down the road a bit.  It also looks very shabby but is really pretty nice.  There are a couple of grassy shaded lawns surrounded by gravel, so I found a nice place.  The decrepit trailer park with the junkyard dogs does kind of detract from the ambiance.

But the hot tubs – the whole point of the place – are really nice!  There are couple of pools with the always-appreciated hot waterfall, and 5-6 individual bathtubs, on the corner of a hill with a great view of the wide Sevier Valley.

I did learn something from the folks I talked to up there.  The row of derelict school buses that make the campground look extra shabby turn out to be a feature rather than a drawback!  The plan is to make them into lodging, and indeed, the nicest one evidently already being rented out as an overnight room.  Like I say, this is a funky place.

Saturday

Excellent morning soak.  I was up there early enough to have a little corner of morning shade.

Then off to Richland, UT for breakfast and the usual amenities of civilization.  I ate in a goofy little Stepford wives breakfast place.  I was able to meet all my daily wifi needs while waiting for my foot-long sando to be assembled at the fine deli there.

Once you go west of I-15 in Utah, you’re basically in Nevada, even though it’s still called Utah for about 100 miles.  I put in my time and get through it – a couple of pretty spots, but pretty barren overall.  I get to Great Basin about 4pm, which is pretty good.   At the Vis Cen I discuss campgrounds with the cute but cranky ranger, and realize that this is the time when I will actually make it all the way to the top and stay at the Wheeler Peak CG, at almost 10,000′!

This is the fourth time I’ve been to this park.  Twice it was later in make the drive to the top.  This time I have time, good weather and propane in the tank so I can stay warm tonight!

I did a small hike, but I now know there is a nice bite-sized 2-3 mile loop trail around a couple of alpine lakes that I could do if I had more time before sunset (and more energy at 10,000′).

Sunday

I started out thinking this was the penultimate day of my trip, but it turns out to be the ulitmate!

Having coffee at the place in Baker was a FAIL, it closes at 9:30 in the morning!  f—ing useless to me.  So coffee waits an hour for Ely.  Billboards keep telling me that the Hotel Nevada has wifi.  I know the Hotel Nevada, it is the historic downtown casino hotel and is pretty cool.  So that becomes the plan – breakfast and wifi in the hotel coffee shop.  I’ve got the laptop on the table, and the iPad on the bench beside me following the Niners game.  In honor of being in a casino I had liver and onions rather than breakfast.  I know that makes no logical sense to you, but it did to me.

A few short miles west of Ely was a HUGE mining operation around the tow of Ruth.  Maybe it was there when I passed through five years ago, but I don’t remember it.  I made it through the three wide valleys and three 7,000′ passes to get to my planned stopover, Hickison Petroglyphs BLM site, at about 4:30.

I pulled into a likely looking site to …. think about what I want to do.  Any other day of the trip, I would’ve stayed right here and been happy to do so.  Set up shop, fiddle around till sunset-ish, take a nice hike and have a pleasant time in this shady little oasis in the high desert.  But I just wasn’t feeling it.  I didn’t want to hang around in the dirt with no wifi for another night when my nice shower and nice TV are a mere 250(!!) miles away.

So I start my engine and strap in for the long, tiring stretch run through 3-4 more wide valleys and 2-3 more high passes, through Austen, Fallon and Fernley with the sun directly in my eyes, through that last scary piece of I-80 (not a scary road per se, but I am a pretty scary driver by that time on this long day).

Indeed, that sofa, shower, tv and bed are might fine tonight!

It sure looks like a plain old mouse – gray and skinny … from a little web research I don’t think it’s a pocket mouse because it’s too big and I don’t think it’s a kangaroo rat because its hind legs aren’t bigger than its front legs, so I don’t know what it is, but having it in my van freaked me out.

[days later: it was just a regular f--ing mouse, such as you might find at a campground a half mile from town, where people basically live while visiting the town.  No magic jumping powers.  There has to be some kind of way in and out of this van in the undercarriage.]

So my relaxing afternoon was not relaxing after all.  I chased it to the back of the van, took all my storage out to try to find him.  All in all I made quite a ruckus and got myself in a big dither – but it was a big FAIL on getting the mouse out.  I now know that my whole model of what the heck was going on was wrong,wrong,wrong, but this didn’t become clear for a couple of stressful days.

These critters are nocturnal, you know.  It woke me up at 2 in the morning with its busy bustling around.  The van is pretty tight in general, but the channel where the electrical wires run from the inverter right behind the drivers seat to the various 120V items in the back of the van is unsealed, and that’s where the little f—er disappears whenever he needs to.

Sunday

Another tour of Marble.  I really love the actual marble strewn carelessly about everywhere, but that’s about it.  The townspeople are not what I would call welcoming.  I was pretty un-charmed by what little I interaction I had with them.

So, out of Marble, up and over the hill, through a succession of valleys, till I round the corner in one steep valley and there is a gigantic coal mine!  The coal mine continues for 3-4 miles, until the little town of Somerset, whose welcome sign says “Coal Mining Town Since 1896″.  And the funny thing is that it really is a mining town – noticeably different from every other little town I drove through in Colorado.  Suddenly the wide road got narrow and windy with crappy little wooden houses crowded right up to the road, just like driving through a West Virginia coal town!  This is not a compliment.

After that the valley opened up a very prosperous little agricultural zone.  I made my best decision of the day, to stop at this orchard store, which turned out to have a little restaurant with breakfast burritos all day, tomato salsa made ten minutes ago, coffee, wifi, apricots and pears from their orchards – awesome!  Delicious Orchards near Paonie, CO if you’re ever out that way.

The valley kept getting bigger, and soon I was on US 550, the major north-south thoroughfare for the west side of the state.  Drove through boring Monroe to make it to Ridgway, and woo!  I’m here.

Here being Orvis Hot Springs.  This and Pagosa Springs are my favorite hot springs anywhere!  If only it were closer to where I live.  It’s a nudie place.  There’s a main building with showers and a kitchen and a couple of private tubs.  You have to wear clothes once you enter the building.   But once outside, there is one big pool, a couple of smaller pools, one very hot small pool, lovely grass to hang out on, and a sauna.  The oddest thing is that there is a smoking pool!  It’s off in a corner, with a couple of industrial-strength ash collectors, where the smokers can indulge their unpleasant vice and have a healthy soak at the same time!  There is a tent camping area, but car camping is just the parking lot.

Monday

After a morning wifi orgy and a soak and free coffee with the brownie I got from the orchard yesterday (I’m so smart sometimes!) it was time to tear myself away.  I had quite a pleasant breakfast in a swishy little cafe in Ridgway.   Ridgway seems like a pretty cool town that I could get used to.  I stopped at the hardware store to buy a non-killer mouse trap.

Very pretty drive over the mountains to the west, along the not very wide or straight road to Telluride.  I’ve been on a lot of such roads, but most do not have BMWs and Escalades screaming down them.

After the turnoff for Telluride things got calmer.  Colorado is such a pretty state.  It’s probably a little greener than usual because of the rainy week we’ve had.  SR xx to Dolores was quite steep and dramatic.  I know from previous trips that Dolores/Mancos is pretty wide open and flat, so as I was coming down the final valley I was looking for the transition.  It was a quick transition.  Ten-ish miles out of Dolores I was still in a narrow, high-walled canyon, four miles later I was in the plains!  Not many campsites around here so I decide to press on to Utah.

I curved around nondescript hills and dales until about the Colo/Utah border when the road straightened and went arrow straight across the gently rising plain to Monticello with the excellent Abajo Mountains behind.  My campground was listed as five miles off the highway.  After my bad experience in Montana I was a little worried, but this time it was a good paved road following basically the same straight line I’d been on for the last 30 miles.

The campground was in scrub oaks and aspens.  Kinda pretty, but it felt cramped to me.  The campground host has a mean dog and seemed kind of sketchy to me.  I didn’t particularly dig it here.  I think the rodent has gotten into my head … as well as my van.

About 2AM my nocturnal companion came out.  I caught the little f—er twice and still didn’t get rid of him! This is crazy. The funny little gray plastic box trap actually worked!  First time I simply opened the van door and dropped him outside and hoped that was the end of it.

No so.  15 minutes later I had a mouse in the trap again.  Same mouse, different mouse, who knows?  I think same mouse.  Anyway this time I put the trap with mouse in it in the tupperware I carry around and put it outside.  I cracked the lid a little because at this point I still did not want to kill the little guy.  I just wanted to study it in the morning and let it go its merry way.  Sounds pretty dumb to write it now, but that’s what I did.

Tuesday

Opened the tupperware in the morning, and no mouse! There were bite and claw marks around the lid, so it forced its way out to freedom.  I am a pretty incompetent mouse remover … I shake off my gloom about all this and start my day.

Coast down the hill back to Monticello, which might be my favorite Utah town after Moab … and I guess Logan.  Most Utah towns are a little too Mormon-y for me, like there’s a polygamy cult over the hill or something.  Basically the whole Mormon thing just creeps me out.  Anyway … there was an excellent little hippie cafe with wifi where I hung for a couple of hours doing my planning thing.  I decided to use one of my extra days to make the up and back trip to the Needles, the southernmost of the three access roads of Canyonlands National Park.

It was an OK day, but I can now say been there, done that, don’t need to do it again.  There were plenty of classic Utah crazy rocks, but I will see plenty of crazy rocks in the next few days.  The other Canyonlands road – Island in the Sky – is way, way cooler.  Much more dramatic to be up there looking down here.

The drive is quite nice though.  Coming back, there are a few miles of wide-open spaces, huge mesas and buttes, a lot like Monument Valley, then a narrow canyon full of cottonwoods closed in by steep cliffs – lots of petroglyphs – Newspaper Rock being the headliner.  Then climb out of that canyon back up the side of the Abajos where you leave the desert and are back in green country, oaks and pines and aspens and some other scrubby thing that was having an early autumn, peppering the hills with yellow.  Drove right past last night’s campground back to Monticello.

Back to this morning’s cafe; I think this is the first time I’ve eaten two restaurant meals on one day on the whole trip, and they were both at the same restaurant!

Tonight’s campground is really nice, much better than last night’s.  This is opposite of what I thought from their web descriptions, go figure.  This one is 12 miles south of Monticello on the main north-south road, up on a little promontory, with an excellent sunset, interesting little cliffs and a feeling of spaciousness.  woo!

I lay out my traps and prepare for another night of matching wits with a little rodent … FAIL again.  I think the little smartie has figured out the plastic box – time to escalate!

Wednesday

Up again, woken by little rodent noises, from about 3am to 5am.  This is not satisfactory.  I’m laying there reading, trying to get sleepy, and it crawls around the edge of my bed onto my sleeping bag and stares at me for a minute.  That’s it.  Definitely time to escalate.  It must leave or it must die.

Drive to Blanding, had breakfast at the local’s place and dropped by the hardware story for an old school snapping/killing mousetrap.  A little wifi at the library, the off into the Utah interior.

So far the Southern Utah crossing is going the same as it always does.  20 miles out of town is the Burr Ridge, a very impressive ridge of sandstone that goes all the way into Arizona.  At the bottom of the ridge is an area with apparently sanctioned BLM camping.  Again, it’s way to early in the day for me to stop, enticing though it might be.   Again, Natural Bridge National Monument seems a litte too off the road to drive down to.  Again the Fry Canyon Lodge looks interesting, but again it’s 1:30 in the afternoon.  Again the White River Canyon looks fascinating from the road.

At Hite, before the dramatic bridge over the upper end of Lake Powell (the impoundment of Glenn Canyon Dam) I break out of my stale narrative and do something I haven’t before.  I take a left before the lake and drive down to the beach and swim in the lake.  Excellent!  That is where I am now, typing and just chilling for a while.  I could stay here tonight, and indeed I’ll bet sunset is amazing here.  But that is four hours from now, and it’s a pretty crappy place to hang out in the middle of the day, so I will press on.

This little swimming break has broken me out of my funk (WOO!), so I am pretty cheerful heading to Hanksville.  There turn out to be semi-official pull off camping places all over the place around here.

I however opt to pay the $15 to stay at the Red Rock Campground, right in the heart of downtown Hanksville (which consists of about 14 buildings).  It’s a cheesy little place, but I’m really enjoying it.

This is possibly the ugliest place to camp in 100 miles.  There’s a junkyard right across the fence. Hanksville is ugly in general, and even though the hills around are natural, they look like mining waste.  Also, the big rains of the last week have made the mosquitoes vicious.  Nonetheless I am very happy here.  I just think I am ready for the shower and a few creature comforts, like walking 20 yards to the restaurant for pie and decaf after sunset, and wifi in the van.

Jackson Wy is just so hippin’ happenin’ and busy that I don’t know how to deal with it.  I’ve driven through three times in the last few years and only stopped downtown once and that was only a five minute walk-by.  There is no place feasible for me to spend the night here, every restaurant looks like a fancy dining experience that I just don’t want, so it’s hard to relax.  The closest I’ve come is Gros Ventre Campground at the very southern end of Teton Park, about 20 miles north.

However, today that would mean going backwards and I want to go forwards, so I get dieseled up and groceried up (at the hippest Albertsons in the world), and off I go. For the first time ever I take a left at Hoback Junction instead of the right to head on down the beautiful Star Valley.  I follow the Hoback River down a beautiful steep canyon, and soon enough I come to Hoback Campground, just as advertised.

The 2-3 really nice spots along the river are taken, so I find the spot that will give me the most privacy, because I realized this afternoon that I really, really must wash my hair.  I’ve managed a cold water shave and a couple of pit washes so the body is OK, but I haven’t maintained the hair since the shower at Oxbow ten (eek!!) days ago, so it’s feeling pretty gummy.  I do accomplish this!  It wasn’t a pretty site, so I was happy that no campers came around the loop at the wrong time to catch me soaping and rinsing at the back of the van.

Thursday

Rain started around sunset, and continued pretty hard through most of the night.  Rain pattering on the van roof is a cozy sound.  If this was a month later it would be thick snow – eek!  In the morning I fill my water tank and head out into the fog.  It was not the scary I can’t see the road in front of me fog, but rather the exciting I can’t see the riverbank a quarter-mile away fog.  It lasted 10-15 miles, then I crested a little pass and poof! it’s gone and out of the mountains and into sunny cloudless boring Wyoming rolling prairie.

Wyoming is so sparsely populated that there will a town on the map and you get there and it’s population 110 (Bondurant, Wy).  Eventually Pinedale turned out to be big enough to have a diner, so breakfast was accomplished.  No wifi, but I did get good enough 3G bars to be able to identify the Rock Springs Library as my wifi spot.  It’s the next real town and it’s only 112 miles away!

This part of Wyoming is rolling scrubland.  At first the very rugged looking Wind River Range was on the left (east), with a covering of fresh snow from last night!  But then it petered out and then was …. nothing much.  Much wider vistas than even Nevada, because pretty much everywhere in Nevada there is a mountain range somewhere on the horizon in every direction.   Here this gently rolling vista of mesquite and sage goes on forever, to the horizon line.  There was this weird stripe of grass in the scrub that followed the road for like 30 miles that I finally figured was where a pipeline was buried.  After I figured that out I saw these pipeline stripes a lot.

Soon enough I was in Rock Springs.  I did the wifi thing, thence to the Ace Hardware to get my propane tank filled.  I really don’t have much interaction with the locals on these trips, usually one meal a day in a restaurant, and that’s about it.  But getting propane turns out to give me a whole other slice of the local life.  At the propane refill spot you get the backcountry folks whose houses run off those little tanks, and the farmers, and around here the miners and drillers.  And the dudes (and occasionally crusty dudettes) that hook up the tanks are usually a funny and talkative lot.

Wyoming, as you may know is all about exploiting its natural resources.  Seemed like every third vehicle was a big white pickup with Halliburton or Andarko on the side (co-perpetrators of the Gulf oil spill).

Part of my daily wifi lust is that I want to research where I will end up that night.  Today I find that there are three different routes that will get me to some kind of campground in 80 to 150 miles.  The preferred methodology is to find their little icons with my camping app on the iPad, and google them on the laptop for the full details.  I could do it all on either device alone, but the dual device approach maximizes the location services of the little guy (iPad) and I can easily switch multiple windows of the browser on the big guy (iMac), without losing my place on the iPad map.

Anyway, Bridge Hollow Campground came up the winner, about 80 miles away, just inside Utah.  The seventh item on the Google search for it said is was the 27th best campground in Utah, which definitely clinched the deal!

Back to the van I check this out on the real map, and oops! looks like the last 27 miles to this CG is gravel road.  Google Maps does not clue one in on this important fact.  bummer.  I head that way anyway, down the east side of Flaming Gorge Reservoir, with the idea that I’ll can continue on to the national forest 50 miles further if I don’t like it.  When I do get to the turnoff it looks like a pretty good road, so I go for it.  Wasn’t too bad it turns out – it became pavement for a few miles at the Utah state line, then back to gravel, but soon enough I was at the Green River, with a sign for the CG 1.5 miles to the right.  This last little bit of road was serious washboard, which I didn’t like.  The campsite is right across the river from the road, and the locals make a helluva racket bombing down it at 30 mph with their metal boats banging on their trailers.  I think there is something to the idea that if you go fast enough over the washboard you sort of glide over the bumps, but I don’t have the heart for that.  I take it slow and thus savor each bump.

This was a most excellent campground.  No one else here tonight, so I got the primo spot right on the river.  The only weirdness is these weeds which are taking over the place.  My theory is that clearing the native brush for campsites has given this invader perfect habitat.

Friday

Hung around for a couple of hours this morning, because my spot is just too awesome to leave.  But 11-ish I head on down that washboardy road.  In the morning I’m not all stressed and crazed as I tend to get at the end of the day when I don’t know where I’m spending the night,. I was Mr Mellow on the bumps on the way out.  Ten-ish miles later I leave this little corner of Utah and enter the great state of Colorado – great in this case because it paves this road that Utah and Wyoming chose not to pave.

I enjoyed the smoothness for about a minute, then there was a sign for a wildlife refuge (NWR) down, you guessed it, a gravel road.  Part of my road trip ethos is that if I pass up an NWR, then I am not managing that day properly.  So down the gravel I go.  The VisCen is closed, but lucky me, a extremely polite and helpful guy was there in his pickup truck to orient me.  Browns Park NWR is a habitat for migratory birds and winter grazing for elk.  Neither of these things is happening right now, but I took the auto tour and soaked up the really astonishing beauty of the Green River up here.  I think I heart the Green River.

Back to the pavement, then a pretty but monotonous drive through northwest Colorado to the town of Craig.  I went to the Village Inn because they serve breakfast all day, and wonderously, they had wifi.  I hung there for about two hours, thus missing the experience of what the Moffat County Public Library might be like.  While there I got a text from Martha that cheered me up a lot.  I was going to have to cramp my trip a lot to get home next Friday, because she was come for a hair appointment on Saturday. Nobody in California can do Martha’s exact blond like my friend Stasia can do blond :)) She got the app’t moced to the next Tuesday, giving me three wonderful extra nights to dawdle around Colo and Utah.  I’m very happy about this!

But now I need to rethink my plan a little bit – how will I spend these three extra days?  I will spend one dawdling somewhere quiet tomorrow (Saturday) night, so as to hit Orvis Hot Springs on Sunday night rather than Saturday.  The other two will allow me to take it a little slower through beautiful southern Utah and maybe take two days to get from Ely to Reno instead of that one day death march.  Thank you Martha!

The rest of today’s plan is to zig east through Steamboat Springs, then south to a campground called Dumont Lake.  Steamboat Springs looks like a pretty cool place – a little precious and spendy for me, but a nice place to hang out.  I did not hang out today, just motored on to the CG.

This is a very pretty place, looking out over a wide meadow.  I got breathless walking back to the registration station and was feeling pretty bad about my fitness.  But then the web page I’d saved says we are at 9,500′ elevation, so I think I’m entitled to get a little breathless.

Saturday

Central Colorado is an unending series of mountain passes and green valleys.  All very scenic but they kind of blur together.  I did a morning’s worth of these, through a constant gentle rain which made the grassy valleys an iridescent green. Getting from here to Marble requires some I-70.  I followed it for about 8 miles to the very prosperous town of Eagle where I had breakfast.

After Eagle I-70 winds its way though Glenwood Gorge,one of the more dramatic sections of interstate I’ve seen anywhere.  My direction (west) was 100 or so feet in the air, and the other direction was directly below, with the river rushing right next to it.  It seemed to be a big kayaking destination, also had a real nice looking bike path.

At the end of the gorge was Glenwood Springs, a very interesting looking town.  Glenwood Springs Resort is a big deal. It has a huge warm pool with water slides and everything.  I did not stop, but would like to someday.  There were funky little bars and restaurants along the river, and the old downtown looked quite inviting with its tree-lined streets and comfy houses.  Add this to the list of places where I would like to spend some time if I ever become rootless.

Here I leave exciting I-70 to turn south for Marble.  All the towns along here – Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, Redstone – all resonate in my memory from childhood.  My mom had friends here.  A couple she had known waaaay back in the postwar era when she and my dad lived in Long Beach … where I was born!  We would plan our every 2-3 westerly trip to visit them.  First in the Denver suburbs, then in Redstone, where they bought a little motel as a retirement plan.

I got off the road at Redstone, and sure enough, it is still there.  Redstone has become seriously yuppified, as has the motel.  ah memories….

Anyway, onward to Marble.  At about the turnoff to Marble the intermittent rain became pretty violent – slow down cuz you can’t see the road kind of violent – with grape-sized hail.   There is a NatFor campground on the road to Marble, so that is where I holed up for the night.  I drove into town, even walked into the one open restaurant, but didn’t really dig the feel of the place so I returned to the campground.

In our last installment I was last seen hurrying straight to Mammoth Campground, so I can park then walk to Mammoth Lodge, and to Mammoth Hot Springs for a picture-perfect Yellowsone evening.   This is a big fat all-around FAIL – the campground is full, and it’s a pretty good distance from those places anyway.  So I hurry to the Visitors Center to get the 411 on campgrounds.   Next best chance is Indian Creek CG — 11 miles away.  I’m stressed, not enjoying the herd of Roosevelt elk on the lawn, or the WPA architecture, or the scenic overlooks, or anything.  All I want out of life is to know I have a place to sleep tonight.   Got to the CG, and got one of the last three spots.  Right next to the smelly portapotty.  Not too great, but I do have a place to sleep.  The bathroom traffic and the smell kinda put me in Walmart mode, where I do my thing and have my fun but try not to notice where I am.

As you may know, there was a huge forest fire that burned quite a large swath of Yellowstone in 1988, including the area outside this campground.  So hiking here is odd, the path is kind of barren, crowded by thickets of juvenile Lodgepole pines only about 2-3 times as tall as me – in other words, boring.  I did manage to find Indian Creek, which was not burned out and sort of pretty.

Tuesday

My campground is closing for the season as of this morning, so everyone has to be cleared out by 11AM.  I get up at 9-ish, and am surprised to see that pretty much everybody is already gone!   I went to bed surrounded by way too much humanity, and poof! they’ve all disappeared.  No doubt headed out to get the best campsites before me … which it turns out they did.

So 9:30-ish I mosey on down to Norris Campground, where I score another unsatisfactory spot.  Not very level and not at all private.   But I stake it out and head off on my sightseeing day.

Do the upper loop today, counterclockwise.   Extremely nondescript drive to the Canyon Visitors Center and coffee shop, where an enterprising raven stole my muffin right from under my nose (hate that!), then do the Yellowstone Canyon Rim Drive and a little walking around.  Someday I will do the drive on the other side of the canyon to Artists Point.

More driving … nondescript stops … the Teddy Roosevelt area, the upper right corner of the loop is already closed for the season … then finally to Mammoth.  I eat a burger at the Lodge restaurant, hang for a while (no Roosevelt Elk herd tonight).  I have been looking forward to Mammoth Hot Springs, but they were disappointing.  They are a shell of their former self – the hot springs mojo has moved. The frequent earthquakes do cause some areas to wax while others wane, and this one has lost stream, so to speak.

It was dark and rainy all afternoon, but suddenly after I started my hike it becomes sunny and warm again.  The turtleneck and beanie that had been so comfortable all afternoon were suddenly unbearably hot.

interlude

Again, note to myself  for the net time I attack Yellowstone:.

• best part – s.w. part – Madison to West Thumb = Geyserland
• good part – mid east part – Canyon to Fishing Bridge, along the lovely Yellowstone River
• extremely boring parts:
  - mid link -  Norris to Canyon
  - along the lake – Fish Bridge to West Thumb is pretty boring
• the whole upper loop is pretty worthless.  There was a place right north of Mt Washburn where you could look at eye level at the raptors, but I couldn’t find a parking place.  East side, west side, north side, south side, all boring boring boring.
• the buildings of Mammoth are very stately and grand, and the elks are cool, but the thermal area has really declined.  Don’t forget the Upper Terrace parking, much better bang for the buck than walking from the bottom.
• Best CG is Norris.  Loop A is really cool.  Loops B and C are commonplace. Loop A fills up early, so best is a two-day attack.  Take your crappy spot first night, nail down a Loop A spot for second night, and spend the day walking over to Norris Geyser Basin!
• Even now, 2 weeks after Labor Day, Norris fills up by 2 and Mammoth by 3.  Grant does not fill up at all, but it is huge and inconveniently located.  Also, its check-in prodecure is hugely annoying and involves a 30 minute line that seems permanent all day.
• passing thru east-west strategy:
  - camp outside West Yellowstone
  - execute to hit Norris by 1 to get a spot
• north-south strategy:
  - camp at National Forest CG 15 miles north,
  - breakfast and wifi in Gardiner, then hit the park!
  - maybe grab a campsite at Mammoth.
• Norris DOES have a trail to the geyser basin, so plan a third day of walking over there in the afternoon.

Wednesday

I start Day Two with a quick tour of Norris Basin.  The rest of the plan is to do the lower, much more interesting loop out of Norris, planning to end up at Grants Village for tonight’s campsite … since I will be leaving to the south tomorrow.  This will involve 20-ish miles of doubling back up the west side to see the big geyser basins, but that’s life on the Yellowstone loops.

Grants Village is huge!  You have to stand in line to personally register, where the functionary assigns you a spot.  I blow 35 minutes doing this, then do a drive-by to see what my site looks like.  The two RV couples next door are partying at their picnic table, having a pretty good time looks like.

I head up the west side of the lower loop to the biggest concentration of geysers, the Old Faithful area, Middle and Lower Basins.

I head straight for Firehole Drive, an excellent experience I remember fondly from other trips. My other favorite stop is Middle Basin, but that is a FAIL because the large parking lot is completely full.  I pulled over to think about how badly I wanted to see that particular set of gushing and bubbling hot water and decided I didn’t have the energy to fight it, so on to Old Faithful.

OF is another substantial geyser basin, with lots of hiking trails, a couple of biking trails., a nice river and usually a few bison wandering around.  I lucked out on OF itself, I don’t like sitting in that giant circle of benches waiting for it to happen, but it did happen anyway as I was walking the tour pretty close to it!

The main attraction of the day was the Giantess Geyser, which is sometimes dormant, and sometimes vary busy.  Today was a busy day.  It was more or less constantly sending water 30 feet in the air, and every 20 minutes or so would launch a 70′ plume into the sky.

My feet hurt.

I finish up my medium sized hike, the head back down the road to Grants Village. RV couples next door are still partying at the picnic table – a little louder than before :).  I head off for a little moonlight hike along our little corner of Lake Yellowstone.  It’s been spitting rain so I wear my heavy coat – good thing because it was pouring pretty hard by the time I got back.

Thursday

Still raining this morning, a good time to leave!  Breakie at the Grants Village snack shop. then down the road to Teton.  There is one more campground down this way, called Lewis Lake.  Looked very inviting for next time.

I never quite seem to budget the time for Tetons Park.  Same this time.  I do take the long way, the scenic drive along a couple of the lakes at the base of the very dramatic mountains.  The rain comes and goes, but the clouds make the whole scenery extra dramatic.  Right south of Jenny Lake a pretty nasty hailstorm blows through – I’d say chickpea-sized ice nuggets bouncing off the van.  very exciting.

Anyway…the reason I’m taking this particular route rather than some other was to camp at the fascinating ghost town of Bannack.  On the 2002 trip I passed through here and still remember how inviting the campground looked.  So, I roll in about 4PM on a sunny Saturday, kinda jangly from a lot of driving – really ready to stop, and … FAIL.   There is some kind of Masonic gathering happening here, commemorating something I didn’t quite get.  The point of this park is to preserve the old west town of Bannack, a short walk from the CG.  So the place is crawling with Masons, and the campground is full full full.  It does look very inviting still, and to camp there on a quiet evening and walk around the ghost town at sunset is still a goal of mine, but it ain’t happening on this trip.

So, back in the saddle, to drive on to Dillon.  The downtown is quaint old west in a decaying kind of way, but the edges are mining and industrial … with the beautiful Madison River flowing nearby, so there’s the occasional upscale fly fishing shop also.  funny combo.

Unlike the canyons of Idaho where I just was, this part of Montana has few (none actually) convenient campgrounds.  These are very broad, domesticated valleys between distant mountain ranges.  The mountains are mostly federal land and have plenty of campgrounds, but they most definitely back-country sites, not at all convenient to the main roads.  My research (done on a comfy chair in the shade in front of a coffee house in Dillon that was closed for the weekend)  turned up a nice sounding CG a mere seven miles off the main road at Sheridan (Montana, not Wyoming!).  So that’s the plan.

Even more driving, through very prosperous looking farms past perfect trout streams, to Sheridan. I note the bakery on the corner for tomorrow morning, take my left and start counting the 7 miles.    The road starts out as nice pavement through town, in fact for about 4 miles, then it turns into pretty nice gravel road with nice rich person houses on it, and then at about mile 6 is the fence and cow barrier that marks the beginning of the National Forest, and boom!  The road goes to hell – very rutted and bumpy and narrow and scary.  I got about 200 yards and meet a 4WD Subaru coming down.  They say the CG is a couple of miles further on. I decide that two more miles of this is not for me and my top-heavy van  I back down the road (between this and tricky campground parking areas I am getting pretty good at backing this thing), to the fence where there is a turnaround.  I say the hell with it and just park there.  Turned out to be quite nice!  There was a roaring stream right across the road, I hung out there in the shade till the sun went behind the mountain, then just did my usual evening things.  One truck went out and back that night, then one in the morning and that was it.

Sunday

Prepare to enter the Yellowstone vortex.  First 3/4 of the day were quite nice.  Had a blueberry turnover and a maple bar and a lot of coffee at the cute little Sheridan Bakery.  The Bakery was pretty 50′s, but the town was modern enough to have downtown wifi!

I did not stop at the Nevada City ghost town.  I did so on the trip 11 years ago (yikes!) and quite enjoyed all the derelict train cars and random pieces of equipment and took a lot of pix.  Just didn’t feel the need this time  Also did not stop at the tourist trappy town of Virginia City. That was a much easier call.

I did stop at Norris Hot Springs, where I happily spent the next two hours.  It is a combo hot pool and roadside bar, a combination I have not seen before!  There was a single pool, 3′ deep and with a sprayer on about half the pool.  In a pleasant little glen with flowers and birdfeeders and shade and lawn chairs and a grill for dogs and burgers and beer by the plastic glass.  If only they allowed camping.  Anyway, noon to 1:45, and I’m outta there, no beer thank you.

Drove past the Red Mountain BLM Campground on the ridiculously scenic Madison River.  It looked very nice and I will remember it for next time.

My plan is to get groceries, fill the tank, and snag a little wifi in Bozeman.  I figure Yellowstone will be a little infrastructure-deprived [no so, Yellowstone is completely infrastructure-deprived!].  I did all that, but the surprise was that I kinda fell love with Bozeman!  Turns out it’s a college town, a directional Montana university is here, and it really makes the downtown nice!   Tons of food places and bookstores and cute coeds and all that college stuff.  Everywhere has wifi and hipsters on bikes.  Again this makes me want to sell my condo so I can do stuff like live here six weeks,  Missoula six weeks, Florence Oregon a few weeks, and so on…

Didn’t escape Bozeman til 4:30-ish.  A little I-90, then south at Livingston on US 89, to head up the oh so scenic Yellowstone River valley to see those iconic National Park sights of Yellowstone Park.

It’s about 5:30 when I pass a really inviting looking Forest Service CG right off the road, but I’m very excited to maximize my Yellowstone experience by camping there and spending the evening at the Mammoth Headquarters area.  This turned out to be a horribly misbegotten idea, pretty much 180 degrees opposite of how one should attack the park, but I didn’t know any better, so I zoomed past the quiet CG, rushed through the quaint and scenic restaurant-filled town of Gardiner to get into the park.  Passed the now famous Teddy Roosevelt entrance Arch, and started winding up the Gardiner River Canyon to get to my campground (HAH) at Mammoth.

I avail myself of the campground’s nice shower in the morning, because you never know when you’ll have access to another shower. [in this case it turned out to be a very long time!].  Up the hill, around the bend and boom!  stunning beauty smacks me right in the face!  The road snakes southward along the edge of the series of reservoirs along the Snake River Canyon, aka Hell’s Canyon.  The campground was immediately below Oxbow Dam.  Now I am above the dam and driving along the Oregon side of Oxbow Lake.  There is not a hint of a breeze, so the water is glassy smooth, reflecting the mountains and trees perfectly.

There appears to be free camping at some of the boat access spots.  There are campers and trash bins and portapotties.  Nothing says camping allowed to me more than portapotties and trash bins in the middle of nowhere and the absence of a No Camping sign!

This wonder of beauty went on 30-ish miles.  Somewhere in there we gain enough elevation that Oxbox Lake levels out to become the river.  Seems like a good place to put a bridge across the river, so the road finally crosses into Idaho, then up a hill past the next dam (Brownlee) which creates the next lake.  Finally the road veers up a canyon away from the Snake River, towards what passes for civilization in Idaho.

Stopped in New Meadows in a failed attempt to find wifi.  It is just a dusty little crossroads town, but I’ve always kinda liked it.  That distinguishes it from the next town – McCall – which I have always loathed.  It’s quite scenically located on the edge of a little lake, but it’s oh so swishy and fancy and so darned pleased with itself.  The library charged for wifi (can you believe that s–t?), which fit my personal narrative of the overall suckitude of that town.  There was a little coffeehouse with wifi that was not tooooo annoying :).

That evening’s web research lead me to one of the most perfect campsites I have ever had anywhere.  The next two towns down are Donnelly and Cascade, both along the east side of Cascade Lake (the map says Lake Cascade but that doesn’t sound right to me).  There are a couple of Forest Service campgrounds on the west side – take a right at Donnelly and follow the signs for 7 miles.  I do this.   It’s Wednesday, and I score the perfect spot, right on the lake.  I swim and fiddle around and enjoy reading and computing in my trusty lawn chair right my the lake.  Come to think of it, I did not even get driven inside by mosquitoes.  Snake River last night, Cascade Lake tonight.  I am on a roll.

It is not a busy lake tonight, in fact there are long stretches of silence where all you can hear is the occasional bird and a bunch of really loud cows across the lake.  There have been three or four bovines that have been bellowing their heads off for the whole time I’ve sat here.  I swam pretty hard, so I feel righteously worked out, and kinda bone chilled … in a good way.

An older yuppie couple comes paddling by in an inflatable canoe/kayak, and beach it a couple of hundred yards up the beach at another campsite.  They made it look so easy that even I could do it!  I quite love being able to bust out my bike on when the evening calls for it, so I can easily imagine how much I would enjoy busting out an inflatable boat … must investigate this …

Thursday

I hang out in the morning because it’s hard to leave such a pretty place.  The site is posted as reserved tonight through the weekend anyway, so I don’t really have a choice about moving on.  I backtrack across the lake to resume my trip down SR 95.  Breakfast in Gramma’s in Cascade.

The last few miles before the town of Burns is a dramatic canyon of the Payette River, tributary of the Snake.  I take my left at Burns on SR 24 to hit a hot springs or two and boom! I’m in yet another dramatic canyon.

My campsite neighbors last night had mentioned the town of Crouch.  I’ve driven this road before but couldn’t place the town, and it turns out the reason that it’s about two miles off the highway.  So you see it on the map, but unless you make the turn you don’t actually see the town.  Both other times I did not make the turn, but I did this time and quite liked it. There’s a post office, a market, and 2-3 restaurants, and that’s it!   One of the restaurants has wifi, so here I am, sittin’ on the porch sippin’ my bottomless iced tea, watching the locals and doing today’s wifi research.  Since the temp is about 15 degrees hotter than I would like it to be, sittin quietly in the shade is a pretty good way to spend the afternoon.   It’s hard to leave again!

Today’s research was thorough, but wasted as it turns out, because Kirkham CG and the associated Kirkham Hot Springs was nearly deserted on this Thursday afternoon!  It was crowded and crazy the other times I’ve been here.  I drove past today expecting the same,  but then I realied that it was nearly empty, so I u-turned and came back to snag the next nearly perfect site in my three-day run of great sites.   Well, the actual campsites at Kirkham are no big deal.  The river is pretty, but the road is very close, and the trucks decelerating around the curves are pretty loud.  What makes the place extra special is the extensive hot springs.

There’s hot water springing out of the ground all over the place around here.  There’s a modest little pool right in the campground, between sites 14 and 15.  But down the hill is a pretty big area about 60′ wide with various amounts of very hot water bubbling out of the ground at 6-8 different places.  It makes lovely hot waterfalls and pools ranging from too hot for comfort to the very cold river.  Just excellent to have it next door all night.

Friday

A little soak in the morning, then on to The Bakery in Stanley.  Managed to get there before it closed at 2pm!   Stanley is the anti McCall – awesomely scenic, yet still folksy and comfortable.  The library wifi is a great example.  It’s basically a tiny one room affair, but the wifi tower is set right in a window facing onto to a grassy yard with a couple of picnic tables, so you don’t even have to go inside to use it, you can sit in the shade in the grass and do your e-business.  very nice.

I pass all the interesting campsites I had researched, and eventually end up at my fourth consequtive nearly perfect spot.  It’s an Idaho Fish and Game FAS – Fishing Access Spot.   This has nothing but a sign, but it’s completely legal camping, free, next to the Salmon River under the cliffs across the river.

Saturday

The drive to the town of Salmon was longer than I thought, so I was seriously ready for food by the time I got there.  There was some kind of charity race going on, so there was very slow traffic and a general difficulty getting around.  But Yelp pointed me to a funky little downtown bistro, looked like it used to be a cowboy bar but now is a chick place, pretty much all women, with gourmet pretensions.  My stomach was set for breakfast, but I made to with a sando and coffee that was actually quite good.

Continue following the Salmon River up through the town of North Fork, take a right, and Montana here I come!

When I’m in the Portland metroplex doing my van thing I always take I-205 (the Portland beltway) to get from here to there in the burbs, but today I’m in no hurry and it’s Saturday, and 205 always sucks, so I decide to go overland.  There is a Trader Joe’s in the eastern ‘burbs on the way to Edgefield, so I plan an overland route from my western ‘burbs to there.  Quite interesting.  I end up driving along the west side of the Willamette River for a while.  It’s a big river, and Portland has some really swank areas on the west side.

I do my TJ’s thing, then continue the overland theme to sneak up on Edgefield from the rear – no freeways!  I book my $34 hostel bed, start hanging out, and get so excited I go ahead and book tomorrow night also.  So Labor Day weekend is solved!   I will hang out at adult Disneyland till the whole three-day weekend thing blows over.  Eat, drink, soak at the soaking pool, dig the loud, drunk wedding party on Saturday night, dig the concert crowd on Sunday night (really deeply boring music, whoever it was, but the excitement was fun), wifi my little heart out, and that’s that.  Everything was pretty perfect until the second night at the hostel, when very late in the night (early in the morning actually) some really drunk and loud fool came in and fumbled for a literal 15 minutes trying to figure out how to open and shut his locker.  A deep voiced fellow on an upper bunk finally threatened to come down and clean the guys clock if he didn’t quiet down.  The desk says that happens on concert nights – people stumble in saying dude, I’m way too drunk to drive home, so they book ‘em a bed in the hostel – good to know…

I spent a good chunk of my time there buried in maps and my trusty camping app planning the next three weeks. I know that I want to end up on a particular hot springs-chocked road in Idaho, but how to get there?  I decide to save a few miles by going more or less straight there through northern Oregon rather than curving up into southern Washington as I did last time.  Then I roughed out the days, and I think I can do a pretty ambitious loop through Yellowstone, into Colorado and back through mind-blowing southern Utah, and still be back in time for Martha’s visit (turned out the plan was a little too ambitious…)

The near-term decision was to not mess around at the local Columbia River wonders – Multnomah Falls, scenic river overlooks, Hood River, those places. The Multnomah Falls parking was super, duper crowded that Labor Day Monday, so good call on that.  Since I wasn’t doing the usual Oregon-side attractions, I crossed the river at Cascade Locks, over a very cool old metal bridge where you can see the river underneath – reminded me of the college mescaline days in Louisville, where we would drive back and forth across the bridge looking down through the corrutaged steel to the river far, far below.  The Washington side is slower and curvier and a lot quieter.  It was kinda cool to look across the river at all the hurly-burly of Hood River (crazy kite surfing and wind surfing scene on the river).

Today’s drive was beautiful, but I felt pretty frazzled, I took many occasions to curse the a-hole who kept us up last night at the hostel.  Especially when I stopped 60 miles down the road and reached for the Oregon Geology book and realized I left it on the front veranda of Edgefield.  Oh fiddlesticks!

SR 74 is a pretty drive, through dry grassy valleys that look very much of the Palouse region of eastern Washington a hundred miles north, although the geology book says they are not.  The only notable civilization on the whole route was Heppner, and it wasn’t much.  Right after it however was a little lake with a campground that I for some reason drove right past.  It looked like a real nice place … why didn’t I stop?  Another sign I’m frazzled, I make bad decisions.

Onward to my destination, Cutsforth Park, a little county-run campground.  About 8 miles before it, the terrain changed from open grassy hills to crowded pine forest hills, which would have been a relief in the middle of a sunny day, but not so much late on a day when I’m pretty gloomy anyway.  It seemed quite dark and depressing and I berated myself for not stopping at the wide-open, sunny lake campground.

Tuesday

My dank little hollow of a campsite was actually pretty sweet in the morning once the sun came over the hills and hit my spot, so to speak.  I did my tai chi, did my chi gung, then gunned the van up the short but steep incline to successfully escape my hollow.

The road – SR 244 from Heppner through Ukiah to Baker City has some quite dramatic vistas at a few points, but it was not, for me, at this time, really worth the effort it took to wend my way through it.  If I could do it over I would’ve simply taken I-84 to Baker City and had 70% of the scenic-ness for 30% of the effort… live and learn…

The Baker City Library had excellent wifi, where I firmed up my near-term plans.  The road out of town is very pretty.  I had done it a decade before in a previous trip, so it was somehow deeply meaningful. Right outside Baker is the Oregon Trail Museum, which is a cool place, but which kinda bums me out.  I love Lewis and Clark memorabilia – they were far-thinking people who at least tried to get along with the Indians.  Their voyage means discovery to me.  But Oregon Trail folks are coming to take land that already has people on it.  Their voyages mean genocide to me.

Anyway, most of the route follows a little river through canyons and cow pastures on its way to the big ole Snake River.  This really is a beautiful, if tiring drive.  The canyons are quite steep and dramatic at times, and there are two distinct big, wide, peaceful farming valleys between the steep canyons.  Very prosperous and very remote.   This whole corner of the state feels like Idaho, even though it’s still Oregon.

Got to my Idaho Power campground on the Snake right below the Oxbow Dam,  Quite a pleasant location – on a point created on one side by the the big ole Snake River, and on the other by the cute little river I followed halfway from Baker City (from a town actually called Halfway, OR :)).  Idaho Power has water to burn so to speak, so there’s a huge grassy lawn to hang out on which they sprinkle in a profligate manner.

So I’m sittin here by the river, watchin the mountain to the east turning red and the sky over the mountain to the west gettin a little pink also – life is good.

Then I hit the hung-over road. As part of the horribleness, I messed something up when inserting my  contacts this morning, so my right eye is not happy and I drive kinda one-eyed to tonight’s campground, at North Almanor, on quiet, pleasant Lake Almanor.

For the final disaster of the day, I do something ugly to the van bumper as I jockey back and forth to get just the right angle in my campsite parking spot.  Basically I’m a one-eyed mess.  With an un-careful angle of the wheels I managed to get a little guide post situated between the front passenger wheel and front bumper, so when I backed up I ripped about a third of the front rubber bumper off the vehicle.  I wish I’d had the presence of mind to take a picture right then, because it looked really awful, but of course I was too freaked!  God bless German engineering and modern plastic, because I was able to pop it mostly back in place.  Not quite all the way, but pretty close.  (Van Specialties was able to wrestle it back to nearly “good as new” … if you don’t look too close).

I walked down the the lake for sunset, not as pleasant as it could have been, what with fretting about the bumper and my puffy eye, and still hungover, and generally talking to myself about what a dumbass I am.  Went to bed early.

Wednesday

A new day, I feel really great just by the absence of feeling miserable, so… good start!  I breakfasted in what turned out to be the exclusive tweeker section of the Kopper Kettle Cafe in Chester. I use their bathroom to finally get the contacts off my distressed eyeballs.  My eye instantly feels like its normal self again, so now, with lack of hangover and two good eyes, I good to go for va-kay!

I had a predictably excellent afternoon in Mt Lassen National Park working my way from the south entrance to most of the way down the north side of the mountain.  I stopped as always at the bubbling mud pit, because it is so darned awesome.  But I did not stop at either of the picture perfect little alpine lakes this time, just didn’t feel the need. I did stop at the look out over the gaping emptiness that used to be Mt Tehama, but which is now a huge blasted space with a five little half-mountains around it.

Camped at Crags Campground, which is utterly boring, just a little loop road in a flat part of a generic Ponderosa pine forest, with absolutely nothing going on.  Which was kinda the point – the other campgrounds are much more exciting … and by exciting I mean busy and noisy and un-private.

Thursday

Coffee from the Manzinita Campground Grocery and my own lox ‘n cream cheese bagel.  I had large chunk of Trader Joe’s salmon in the fridge when I left, and now it’s in the van fridge, waiting for days like this!  Thence to fucking hot Redding, where I hoped to find a little wifi but otherwise planned to drive straight through.  However … driving across the Sacramento River on the downtown bypass I saw a white spire a little to the north.  I had a vague memory of reading about this in the Chronicle, so I hit the next exit and headed over there and was really glad I did.  It is the Sundial Bridge, a pedestrian span over the Sacramento River.  Trails, arboretum, river, sharp angles, cool shapes, shade, signs, all of it!  It would be really fine in the late, quiet and cool(er) afternoon.  This accomplished something I would have thought impossible, making me like Redding enough to conceive of living here.

Thence to a Starbucks for wifi, to figure out my Eureka visit.  Twisty-turny SR 99 to Weaverville and on to Pigeon Point Campground, which was quite perfect.  I was first one there that evening, so I got my pick of the eight sites – my van door angled directly at the river about 30′ away.  It was so perfect and un-buggy that I slept with the door open all night, which I almost never am able to do (too cold or too buggy).  I even swam in the Trinity River!  My toothpaste tube was still quite warm to grasp at 11PM, such was the radiant heat of Redding that afternoon.

Friday

I get to the Eureka-Arcata metroplex so early that I take a little nap then a walk around the Arcata sewage treatment hiking path.  Then I drive the long way around the bay, down the west side past Manila. I utterly failed to find Katie’s house, but she was out running errands with her mom, so I pulled over and let Katie and Betty find me and lead me “home”.  Katie was busybusybusy, so I called Aimee, picked her up in exotic Manila where I had jsut been.  We ate excellent Thai then met Katie at the Shanty, their go to bar since forever. Take Aimee home, back to Katie’s, take my first shower since Reno, and whew! go to bed.

Saturday

Coffee and a couple hours of wifi and Eureka ambiance, machaca con huevos at Ritas, hang with Aimee at her mindblowing house, topped off with an actual Katie sighting at the Eureka Inn where a local friend-band was playing.

Sunday

I think I have done everything that needs doing in Eureka, so today is the day to move on.   Later, I wished I’d hung out with the Hennessey’s another day, but that was then, this is now, so to speak. Katie and I have an adventure trying to find a restaurant that’s open this Sunday, and finally end up at the Mexican she always drives past to go to the better (but closed today) Mexican.  Turns out she’s been making the right choice all these years.   But we finally are able to do all the catchin’ up we hadn’t yet done, causing me to …

… not actually get on the road till 4:30 or so.  So I did not do any of the scenic things there are to be done on the scenic drive from coastal bluffs to redwoods heading north.  I just more or less booked it straight to Crescent City.  There I pulled over by a downtown park and had a little decision moment – should I call up Mandy the missing Hennessy, who lives here with her husband and kid and dogs, or should I find a spot, or should I keep going.  The deciding factor was finding the website of an RV park about 80 yards away, which said they had sites for $17.  Since I was right down by the bay, in the heart of historic and scenic CC, that seemed like a winner.  They turned out to have showers and good wifi, so it indeed was a winner.

Unfolded my bike, explored the harbor in one direction, then the lighthouse and cliffs in the other direction.  Followed the cliffs till I found a bluff perfectly angled into a rippin fine NorCal sunset over the jagged rocks.

interlude

Here, for my own reference for next time, is a list of places on the Oregon coast, south to north, important to ME (your mileage may vary):

• Brookings, didn’t stop
• Harris Beach SP – very sunny and pleasant and $20 – looked like fun
• Golds Beach, didn’t stop
• Port Orford – beautiful southward cove overlook, a bakery/deli with a great italian sando and nice looking pastries.
• Cape Blanco – my home for the evening.  busted out the bike for the second night in a row, had a pretty long ride.
• Brandon – enjoyed the coffee place, but not overwhelmed, would try the other one next time.
• Coos Bay/North Bend – traffic-y, just get it over with.  The bridge is pretty impressive though.
• Tyee CG (USFS) looked awesome, but didn’t stop.
• Florence – my favorite by far of all these little towns.  Nice downtown nestled under the bridge.
• dunes
• Sutton Lake Campground – my second night on the coast.  Also bikeable.
• Yachats – kinda precious, but a happening coffee house.
• Rock Creek Campground, USFS.  never yet camped there, but it looks great.
• Cape Perpetua – note this also is Federal rather than state, so senior pass applies!
• Newport – Aquarium and Nature Center, and a nice walk along the bay.  Another impressive bridge.
• Depoe Bay – my second favorite of all these little towns.  Love the cute little harbor.
• Lincoln City – getting close to Portland, things are starting to build up.
• Devil’s Lake State Park – right in the urban area.  Can cross the highway to the ocean, or check out the lake.

That’s it for this trip, here I cut inland on SR 18 for the descent into suburban Portland traffic hell.

Monday

Had the smoked salmon omlette at the Fisherman’s Cafe on my way out of Crescent City.  Clearly one of those Portuguese fisherman places – the six different items made with lingiuca was my first clue.  Worked my way up the Oregon coast through the places named above, to end up at Cape Blanco, a state park, and a beautiful one at that.  I biked down a hill I hadn’t even noticed in the car, but which kicked my ass on the bike.  Then a walk down to the rocky beach.  mighty nice evening!

Tuesday

Backtrack to Port Orford for that yummy pastry, but it’s gone!  And the service is slow, so I bail and head on to …

… morning coffee in Brandon.  Yelp listed two likely downtown places, I missed the turn for the first, so ended up at the second.  It was ok, cuties working the register, which always helps, but crappy wifi and too many bikers.  I wanna try the other on next time.

Stop for a little quick walking tour of Florence, and walk out of my second coffee places in one day, and feel good about it!

North of Florence are a couple of Suislaw National Forest campgrounds, which are half price to me.  I choose Sutton CG.  I unfurl the bike for the third night in a row(!), explore the area, then take the short hike to the dunes.  Sunset over sand dunes is kinda rad, since the white sand picks up those  muted pinks and oranges nicely.

Wednesday

what DID I do this morning?  Ah yes, I had morning coffee at an annoying hippie spot in Yachats.  Actually I’m being a hater – it was nice except for no refills, and clearly beloved by the locals – so upon review, the place was fine, it’s the Yachats locals I find annoying :)

Did not stop at the excellent Cape Perpetua – been there done that.  I did stop at the Newport harbor – parked at the Aquarium and took a walk, then actually went into the Nature Center. The onwards, to the only camping place that looks reasonable – Devil’s Lake State Park.

I did a double take when I got to where it is supposed to be, because I was still in the middle of Lincoln City.  And sure enough, that is where it’s at.  Devil’s Lake is pretty big and its outlet constitutes a small river (called the “D” for some reason).  So right after the bridge over the “D” River, turn inland and there’s the park, tucked in behind the row of commercial buildings along 101.  Sites are not at all private – your business is everybody’s business, but they’re nice and well-maintained – it is after all an Oregon State CG – and there are showers.  I had a fun time here.

Thursday

This was supposed to be Van Day, but because of my usual late start and dawdling it turned put to be getting to Van Day.  Once I turn inland, the 80 or so mile drive is one of those where you start out in bucolic countryside, and as you progress the traffic keeps getting thicker and the suburban sprawl keeps getting worse till eventually you’re sitting in a half mile backup at some stupid traffic light in the suburbs.  I took a break to drive through downtown McMinnville, because I enjoyed it last time.  Still looks nice!

Sadly, when I got to the van place, they had moved!  The really sad part is that they moved to a place I had just driven within a mile of, so if had I known I could’ve cut north a few blocks and missed the worst of the stupid suburban traffic.  aarg!

Anyway, I re-meet everybody, tell them my troubles, get myself scheduled for first thing in the morning, then head out to try to address my other van issue.  My fancy Kenwood radio/video/everything console has an Apple plug that plays my iPod nicely, but will not play my iPad or anyone’s iPhone.  So I fought afternoon traffic on I-205 (which in my experience is one constant day-long traffic jam) to visit Dave at Stereo King … and it worked!  His worker bee kid brought out an upgrade disc, put it in my DVD player, pushed a few buttons and boom! I am iPad-aware!  I can control my iPad via the Apple plug rather than a headphone cable, which is a great improvement.   Perfect in fact, except that the Apple plug cable isn’t long enough to put the iPad anywhere convenient, but still a quantum leap in traveling convenience!  If I go back up there next year I will probably a dorky iPad holder screwed into my dashboard, which will make me feel like a real playah!

I had a nice dinner at one of those Japanese restaurants with the little sushi conveyor belt that goes around and around and around.  I am a sucker for those.  Slept at Van Specialties, angling myself at their window to maximize my wifi.

Van day

Friday to you.  It was hectic and tiring as those days always are.  Hanging out there is an experience in itself.  They are very opinionated and funny people, and then there are all the usual little business dramas and the customers, and it turns out they apparently have a set of regulars who just wander in to shoot the s–t for a while  Anyway they fixed everything on my list, even my f–ed up bumper.  Litch found the gas leak, glued my unstuck laminate, replaced my bad receptacle, and most importantly re-explained lots of the little details of how to maintain this complex machine.  I now have written instructions for how to drain and refill my water system.  He re-showed me the correct way to [un]furl my awning, and he replaced the crappy awning fittings.  And because they are very nice and also probably because it secretly offends then to see one of their van sooooo dirty, they also washed the darn thing! I feel ready to roll now!

Even though I’m spending Friday night of the big weekend in their parking lot again, I get out of their hair for the rest of the afternoon – nice walk around the Tualatin Wildlife Refuge, then dinner and a fun couple of beers and live hippie music at a local place I had spied the night before.

Then a 2,600′ drop, from 3,500′ at Pina to 900′ at Borrego Springs.  The campground was full and there were people everywhere photographing the flowers and cacti.  I hung for a while then drove to Blair Valley which was alleged to have good flowers.  It did not really, but it was green and pretty and I spent a very enjoyable hour there.

Martha and I are to meet at Champagne Lakes RV Resort in the hills outside Escondido.  It looked good on the web as a place to meet up for our first night before heading to the beach.  It was pretty funky, but comfortable enough once we got my electricity straightened out.  Martha showed up about dark, and woo hoo – happy family time!

Wednesday

Our little gravel spot along the sorry little creek between the shabby little duck ponds served it’s purpose quite nicely for a first night’s meeting before heading into the hurly burly of San Diego.  I’ve zoomed along I-15 a hundred times, but I’d never ventured into any of the steep canyons to the east, and it turns out they are quite charming.  Even better, the road to get there is Old 395!  395 is of course the north-south artery east of the Sierras through Reno, so it’s cool to think that back in the day I could’ve trundled all the way from Reno to here on it.

We ate in a nice cafe in Vista, which has a very inviting downtown sidewalk cafe scene.   We can’t check into our expensive campsite till 2pm, so we split up. Martha and Tyler go to the beach and I go to the Encinitas Public Library, where I web-surf with an ocean view!

Our $50 site at San Elijo State Park is really nice, right on the bluffs.   The weather is less nice, 60′s and blowing fog.  But we are at the beach!   Carlton and family come over for an evening fire and hanging out and catching up.

Thursday

Martha wants to change venues, to a campground on Mission Bay.  I am not a particular fan of this, but we are all happier when she’s happy, and as it turns out it was a great call!   We split up for the morning.  They go to the beach, and I go to Yogi’s Sports Bar for breakfast and to watch Louisville’s first round game (NCAA playoffs!).  To my stupefaction and disappointment, #4 seed Louisville loses to #13 seed Morehead State.  ridiculous, nearly unprecedented.  But on the upside, I don’t have to worry about the tournament anymore.  The one and only team I care about is gone, which will free up my time  over the next couple of weeks considerably.

Martha’s campground – Campland By the Bay – turns out to be perfect for us!  Our “campsite” is just a parking place in one of the parking lots, but it’s right next to the bay and to a lovely grass field, and to the little restaurant.  Tyler had a great time, so Martha had a great time, and I had a pretty good time.  We pretty much fell in love with Campland.

Friday

San Diego day.  Coffee at a nice little muffin shop in PB (as the locals call Pacific Beach), M and T hit the beach and I wifi’ed, making both of us happy.   We tried to cruise some touristy spots in Balboa Park, but San Diego traffic made the adventure way less fun than I’d hoped.  We punted and grabbed lunch at our old favorite Point Loma Seafoods, then spent the rest of the afternoon back at good ole Campland.

Saturday

Leaving day.  I was finally able to spend some quality time with my friend Elton, he and roomie Isabel met us for breakfast at the Campland restaurant, then Martha and I left in our separate cars to make our separate ways north to our separate homes.  I thought I was going to take three days to get home, but the weather is turning bad so I’m a lot less sure of that.

In either the two day or the three day plan I want make it to Lone Pine tonight, since there’s really nothing but inhospitable Mohave desert south of there, so I just book it up I-15 to 395, stopping for a lovely little nap somewhere in that wasteland.

The weather is getting genuinely crappy, snow level is down to 4-5,000′, which is bad news since 395 north of Bishop is above 7,000, for about 40 miles.  I get to Lone Pine with about an hour of daylight left, so I decide to press on to Bishop, to the free BLM campground at Horton Creek.

The campground was closed for the winter – duh.  But it is deserted up there so I just found a level spot on the turnaround before the gate and set up there.  It’s basically dark anyway.

Sunday

Dealin’ with the weather and gettin’ home day.  The world looked quite magical when I got up.  It turns out that I parked almost exactly at the snow line.  Uphill, all was white, and getting whiter all the time.  Downhill, the snow started fading quickly, and 200 yds down the gravel road there is no snow, it’s raining down there.  The sagebrush and mesquite outside my van is quite photogenic, loaded down with a couple of inches of fresh, wet snow, and the panorama across the valley is stunning – the top half is winter wonderland, but the bottom half is just a wet, cold spring day, and there is a straight horizontal line separating the two all across my 40 mile panorama.    I can simply coast the 200 yards downhill to escape the snow, so no worries here.  Later, on the road in the passes, I’ve still got plenty of worries.

I harden a couple of arteries with a gutbuster breakfast at Jack’s in Bishop where I get down to seriously planning my day.  There are chain controls about 30 miles north of here on 395, and the dude in the parking lot with six inches of snow on his SUV says it’s pretty bad.  I remember that US 6 starts here and heads east, through Benton CA towards Tonopah, to hook up with 95 north through Hawthorne and Fernley.

Google says that route is about 80 miles longer, but it’s much lower altitude and there’s no snow alerts, so I decide to do that.  There are, it turns out high wind alerts.  At the little down of Benton I get a scare.  The rain has turned into fat heavy snowflakes that are starting to make about an inch of slush on the road, and I have about another 800′ of elevation to get to the pass ahead.  But then the fact that I am heading more or less due east into the central Nevada desert comes to my aid, and the snow stops before the summit!

The rest of the drive is easy, except for a little two-fisted driving around Hawthorne and Walker Lake.  Hawthorne, with that giant Munitions testing area is an odd place.  At the end of the day, driving west down 80 back into Reno I rejoin the rain.  If I had gone 395 I probably wouldn’t have made it home tonight.

One quiet night in Florida on my last trip I got a call offering me a gig to teach a session of IS 101 – Introduction to Computers at Truckee Meadows Community College. I had quite enjoyed teaching a similar course back in Marin, and it’s one of the regrets of my move to Reno that I left there at the exact moment when I had finally connected on that job, which could have grown into a nice little permanent thang if only I had stayed there.

So here I am with my fancy camper van and a life that I am setting up to be on the road a lot, so what do I get?  I get a job whose basic requirement is to be in the same place for four and a half months at a time.  Oh the irony…  But what does this have to do with this post and this trip?  Well, it’s Spring Break of course!  Since I am tethered to Reno for the whole semester, that one week of freedom takes on a much greater importance that it otherwise would.

At the end of my epic East Coast road trip I had planned to camp in Death Valley, but I ended up driving through with only a quick stop, because the ole’ El Nino monsoon pattern was setting up over Southern California and I thought it was the better part of valor to get the heck out of there, and I’m glad I did.  But I consoled myself with the idea that I could return now, at spring break, when the flowers would be starting to take off.

I taught my Thursday at 11 class, had a slice and a salad at the (quite nice) TMCC cafeteria, and here I am three hours down US 395. Tomorrow I will either take a left at Lone Pine and head to Death Valley or I will keep blasting down the highway to look for flowers in the southern desert (Anza Borrego) instead.  I really have no idea which I’ll do.

Friday

In the quickly warming morning (5 degrees an hour in the other direction also!) I find that I am parked in a beautiful spot!  I can see Mono Lake in the distance through the trees, and my old friend Lee Vining Creek is rushing right below me, making a helluva spring thaw racket that I didn’t recognize last night because of the wind.  There is a spur of the Sierras right in front of me and another to my right (with the lake to my left and the creek to my left and down).  No traffic to speak of, so I hung out for 1/2 hour just diggin’ the creek and lake view.

First order of business was to buy painfully expensive diesel in Lee Vining – oh if only I’d stopped in Minden.  It was SO expensive that the pump ATM cut me off at $75 … 13 gallons for $75 – EEK!  It turned out to be a good thing that I couldn’t fill up.  I got way cheaper gas down the road at the Indian Reservation above Lone Pine.

Breakfast at The Stove in Mammoth.  Crazy tall piles of snow in Mammoth, 10′ – 15′ piles of snow everywhere, completely covered a little one-story insurance building.

Slow easy drive down the extra-lovely 395, to eventually ending up at Tuttle Creek CG near the Alabama Hills outside Lone Pine.  Still don’t know if I’ll go to Death Valley or not.  From the vantage point of Tuttle Creek, the waxing moon makes the Owens Valley look spectacular tonight, which is a great argument for going to Death Valley and getting more of that fine desert moonshine tomorrow night..

Saturday

Well, Death Valley it is!  I return to the very friendly little bakery/coffee/wifi place in downtown Lone Pine for an hour or so of wifi-ing – planning the next four days and catching up on my news and sports sites.  Martha called, and it turns out she will not be in San Diego till Tuesday … which gives me an extra night to play with!

The jog over from 395 through Death Valley looks so easy on the map that I always forget that it is a f— of a lot of driving.  I begin full of enthusiasm, driving around the much wetter-than-usual Owens Dry Lakebed, formerly Owens Lake before the LADWP (Los Angeles Department of Water and Power) stole the life of this enchanted valley.  There I hit SR 174, which I last drove in the other direction in monsoon rains and fog in late December.  For the first time I actually stopped at Panamint Springs.  It always looks user-friendly as I zoom past, and up close on a mild spring day it seems to really be user-friendly.  It comprises a pleasant looking little desert campground ($7!) across the road from a bar/restaurant with good beers on tap and a wide porch from which to watch the sunset.  Gotta plan a stop here oneofthesedays…

But today it’s onward, where I more or less drive straight through Death Valley again without staying over night!  I think there is a structural problem with my planning around here.  Namely, Tecopa Springs seems so close (although it’s another long 86 miles from Furnace Creek), that I’ll always end up there for the night if I’ve only one night to spend in the area.

This is my third time at Tecopa, and the first time without very strong winds.  It’s quite a bit nicer this way!  Tonight it’s possible to walk around in the evening and enjoy the real beauty of the place.  After you’ve walked three blocks, you’re out of town, in this very pretty and very interesting saline marsh that is just an excellent place to take a sunset walk … if howling winds aren’t keeping you huddled in your vehicle.

The other big news this time is that I figured out my hot springs and campground IS the Inyo County Park I’ve looked for each time I’ve visited but never been able to find.  The map clearly shows a county park  here, and I have driven the area looking for it and have been very puzzled to not find it.  This time I thought to ask at the office and this is it!  Mystery solved!  On the web there is a back story that the commercial enterprise running these springs got a little too druggie or a little too weird i in some fashion so the county took it over.  Inyo runs a lot of parks that aren’t exactly Inyo parks.  Back on 395 around Lone Pine, Big Pine there were little parks on LADWP land administered by Inyo County.

Sunday

It’s that time of year, the Sunday when we all spring our clocks forward.  The laptop and the iPad know to spring themselves, and normally the cell phone would also, but there is No Service out here, so my poor ole cell was an hour off until we got closer to civilization and it quietly corrected itself.

A pleasant morning soak before returning to desert driving.  There are tons of Japanese folks here this time, I’d say 60-70% of my fellow soakers are Japanese.  They know a good thing when they see it!  Back when the Hot Creek near Mammoth was open most of the bathers seemed to be German, and most of the folks at Walley’s seemed to be some kind of Eastern European.  Not sure what the easy generalization is here, except that foreigners value our hot springs more than we do, but that is what I have observed.

My stomach was set for the Greek place in Baker, but it was not to be.  I’d forgotten how noisy, hurried, and generally un-atmospheric the place is, and they were no longer serving breakfast (feta omelet would have been mighty good), so I ended up at the Big Boy.  The town was ridiculously crowded – 40 car line at the stop sign, similar gluts of short-tempered drivers everywhere.  When I finally escaped and crossed I-15 to head into the Mojave Wilderness I saw the reason.  I-15 west was stopped dead as far as the eye can see, and you can see pretty far out here.  I am glad I was just crossing it and not planning to go on it.

I did not stop at the charming renovated train station in Kelso which I soo enjoyed last time.  In fact I did not stop much of anywhere until Twenty-nine Palms and Joshua Tree.  All the campgrounds but one were full!  … on a Sunday night in March before flower season … go figure!  I did find a pretty sweet spot in Jumbo Rocks CG and spend the remainder of the day and a little of the night (waxing gibbous moon!) clambering around the rocks.

Monday

Coffee and wifi at the little cafe next to the Visitors Center in the town of Joshua Tree.  If I was the kind of guy who wanted to retire to a warm, desert-y place (which I am not!) this would be high on my list of prospective homes.   Pleasant and open, interesting places nearby, and just enough action.  Palm Springs 50 miles away!

I got my day’s exercise walking about Big Morongo Nature Preserve, then did a walk-through on Sam’s RV Campground.  They have really nice hot tubs there.  But it’s $44 for the night, and even $14 for day use.  I would do that if I had the whole day, but I don’t.  There are a ton of really nice hot springs resorts in Desert Hot Springs, but they are all expensive to get at.

Now for the strange, winding road to my destination on Palomar Mountain.  First comes the strange part – Palm Springs, then comes the winding part – the road out of Palm Springs.  After three days of deserted desert driving, where even the civilized areas are somewhat worn-out and empty, it’s very disturbing to suddenly be in fifteen miles of Jaguar dealers, potted palms, manicured green lawns and fancy restaurants and being cut off by Vuarnet-wearing rich kids in BMWs and old golfer dudes in Cadillacs.  You take a left on SR 111 and start climbing.  First a straight shot through the golf communities and the Cadillacs, then suddenly it’s all over -  you pass your last manicured lawn and boom!, you’re back to the empty roads and the pickup trucks and the desert rats – was it a mirage?

After another hour or so of twisting through the So Cal mountains, I did make it to Oak Grove CG, in the Palomar section of the Cleveland National Forest.  A pretty big campground with only two other campers in it tonight.  It was very pretty in a dry live oak-y way and it did have running water, which is the first I’ve had in four days!