Utah..part I - The Delta Connection

Well, that last episode ended quite suddenly. I had a chance to upload it and grabbed it. We are in another place with little or no communications. We are in Delta, Utah. Never heard of it? Neither had we. We landed here because Coast to Coast had a place here and it was about 2 hours south of Salt Lake City. I wanted to show Salt Lake City to Cheryl but didn’t want to drive the motorhome too close to there. I figured one day to see the city and check out the salt lake so I started out by booking 4 nights at Delta. As things turn out, by the time I actually got reservations in Grand Canyon and Mesa Verde, I had to rebook everything to make it fit. I ended up increasing my time in Delta to 6 nights followed by 7 in Torrey, UT before trucking off to Mesa Verde. There was about a week between Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon so I put in 3 or 4 (can’t remember) nights in Monument Valley (almost forgot to stop there at all) and still have 3 days that aren’t booked between there and the GC. We will work that out as we see how everything else goes. Coast to Coast does not seem to have any places along the southwestern area of Colorado and the Northern parts of Arizona and New Mexico so we may be stuck in regular camp grounds. Failing all else, we will probably head over to the GC and see what is available either in the non reserved park campgrounds or the private ones.

Well, we headed north from Vegas and saw a lot more desert. While we were on the road, we decided it was time to log onto the computer and register our motorhome. Cheryl gathered up all of the paper required and logged onto the web site. All of a sudden, Cheryl asks me when the registration is due. July, says I knowing that I had looked it up before we left. “How come this registration form says it ran out in ((((((April)))))!!!!! In mere seconds, I pulled into a truck parking area that just happened to be coming up. I looked at the registration form and just turned white. “You mean we have been driving across the country in a motorhome with no registration?”

Cheryl looked over at me and said with a straight face “Yea, but the insurance is good until July of 2009!” You never worry about things like the registration until you realize that it is not registered. Then you see police cars behind every rock and just know you are about to be pulled over. Then you must camp on the side of the road until you can get the coach registered.

We thought about it for a while. We could continue to register the camper over the internet. The problem is that it would take 7 to 10 days for the state to process it before sending it to our home address. It would then take the post office 3 to 5 extra days to get it forwarded to my mother who would then send it to us via 2 day overnight mail. That would mean at least one more travel day and maybe 2 before we would have the new registration. What other options are there? We called the Town Office to see if they had any ideas. When you lay the situation out to someone, you feel like a real idiot. I had looked everything over before we left and decided that July was the registration month. It turns out that July is the new insurance policy month. I had gotten new insurance cards to be effective in July before we left and somehow connected this with the registration (well, you have to have the insurance card to register the vehicle). It makes sense if you stand far enough back.

We got through to the Town Office to find out that they have changed the hours and close at 3 pm on Fridays…..it was 3:30. I did get a message to leave a message and someone would get back to me (when I had no idea). I can say I was happy to hear my phone ring only minutes later. We talked about the situation and a solution was suggested. The online registration was rejected due to time restraints but my mother will go to the town hall on Monday morning (I will not publish this until I have my registration well in hand and on the camper…just to be safe. You never know who is reading these things). She will then overnight mail the new registration to us and we will have it Wednesday. It is amazing how many people it takes to rescue me when I do something really stupid! For all of the help, I am truly grateful.

Back on the road, watching every speed limit change and keeping an eye out for the gendarmes, we headed out of Nevada into that little northwest corner or Arizona above and to the left of the Grand Canyon. We wondered if we would catch a glimpse of it but little did we know that there was a mountain range between us and the great hole. But surprise of surprises, we found one of our own. We watched this mountain range get closer and closer. It began to look like there was a large cleft in the range and that the road headed towards it. I just knew that the road would turn away at the last minute but it didn’t. We turned towards the gap and started climbing. In the early part, the rock had been cut away to make the road but soon we were in a canyon of grand proportions. We climbed and climbed and the rock formations grew more and more spectacular. There were layers of red, yellow, orange and tan and at the bottom was a tiny river. This river had carved out this huge canyon through the various colored sedimentary rock. The river was the Virgin River and the geological result is the Virgin River Canyon. It is the Rollinsford Canyon to its New York City Canyon counterpart but you do climb for 12 miles before you start down again. You reach 6,000 feet + and you wonder why there aren’t more accidents with everyone staring at the canyon. Then you come upon a serious accident in the southbound lane where a pickup truck had its front end ripped off in the middle of the road.

Soon we passed an ambulance headed south and hoped all was well. The scenery evened out and we continued to make time. We stopped at exit 4 right after we entered Utah to gas up…Almost $300 but I think it will last us a couple of weeks. We also grabbed a couple of “Big Dogs”. Remember the ½ lb hot dogs we had in Vegas? Well the Flying J had them too but they were wrapped in bread dough or pizza dough and baked in the oven. I was afraid that they would be overdone sitting in the case but they were delicious; done perfectly, moist and easy to handle. We didn’t want to stop because we had a rather long travel day and had lost several hours at the Camping World (not to speak of several miles in a southerly direction when we needed to go north). We drove through part of Nevada, the corner of Arizona and then had to go 178 miles into Utah to get to our exit. Then another 28 miles to Delta.

The road to Delta took us farther and farther from civilization. We left the highway behind and drove through desolate range with an occasional farm. I was beginning to wonder just what I had gotten us into when Delta appeared on the horizon (the land is so flat that you can see the horizon long before you get to it). The town is a true example of a western town. There are 2 travel lanes in each direction with a turning lane in the middle (big enough for cars to turn either way passing each other and not hitting). There was also a parking lane on either side. Now this parking lane is big enough to park cars three abreast without going over the line into the first travel lane.

The town is an interesting mix of business. There are at least 2 good sized grocery stores and a couple of little ones. There is an ALCO store that we were told by the lady running the hardward store was an offshoot of Walmart for small towns. There is a nice hardware store with a connected Radio Shack, a couple of parts stores, a big museum, a couple of pizza places and a bar (private club open to visitors willing to buy a 3 week membership for $4), 4 gas stations (all with the same prices) a nice fairgrounds still sporting a sign saying there will be a demolition derby on the 4th of July, an honest to goodness meat market, some farming stores, a café and 3 steak houses. There are several other businesses on the back streets.

I suppose it is time to talk about the organization of this town. The streets are laid out in a perfect grid pattern. The naming convention is simple but totally confusing. All of the streets are numbered. You have 100, 200, 300 etc. That in itself is not confusing but they have them running in both directions. Starting at Main Street each street parallel is numbered 100, 200, 300 etc. They are east 100 on one side of Main Street and West 100 on the other side. That in itself is easy.

Now let’s look at the streets that cross Main Street. They start at 100 and go 200, 300 etc except that they are North 100 on one side of Main Street and South 100 on the other side. Now picture this. Every street in town is named a direction and a number. Add the number of the house or building onto that and you can have an address in hand and spend an hour not finding it. We were looking for a propane dealer and finally gave up. As we were on the way back to camp, I spotted it in back of a vacant lot (closed of course).

The people here know this must be confusing to visitors. When you call a business, they always tell you what building to turn at and how many blocks to go.

I have been confused since we got here. Since we started the trip, Monday has always been travel day but we didn’t spend a whole week at Vegas so we moved on Friday and haven’t been able to figure out that it was a weekend. We found the post office at 3 pm; they closed at 12. We took the day off on Saturday to rest up from the late hours in Las Vegas but we had trouble getting our arms around the concept that it was Saturday.

We worked on the camper (now the steps don’t work right) and got the new chairs and table out and set up. We set up an area to cook outside, did some grocery shopping and realized that this was a Saturday night nascar race night. We remembered seeing a bar downtown and figured that they might have the race on a TV there. We got there and saw a sign saying that it was a private club. They also had a sign saying visitors were welcome so we hit the buzzer and they let us in. They said we had to buy a temp membership but before we put up the $4, I asked if they had the race on TV. Mary (the bar tender) looked at me and asked if putting the race on TV was what it would take to get us to join. I said we hadn’t seen a race since we left home so she invited me behind the bar and handed me the remote. It was direct TV so I went right to Channel 245 and there it was. I paid the $4 and $3 total for 2 drafts and they turned on the big plasma and we watched the race. When the race got down to the last 15 laps, several of the other patrons moved away from the bar and watched the end with us.

Then we headed back to camp and made supper. The weather here is a lot nicer than we have been experiencing. It is in the low to mid 80s in the early morning rising into the 90s in the afternoon. As the sun starts to go down, the temperature drops back into the 80s. This is much more comfortable than the mid 120s that we have been experiencing.

Today is Sunday. Cheryl has been checking out the churches locally and picked one to go to. We got up late and she called them finding out that the service was scheduled to start in 10 minutes. We dressed furiously and headed down the street. We got there late but they hadn’t started. We thought they might be waiting for us but the minister’s husband hadn’t gotten there yet and he plays the music (guitar). They were about 15 minutes late getting started. They had a guest speaker Jim Montgomery from Tulsa, Oklahoma (that is what he told us but his brochure lists Broken Arrow, OK). He also has a calling in Israel which he attends to several times a year. This is a small evangelistic church. There were only about 15 people there. It was very friendly and had a luncheon after church (which they do every week). This week there was a choice of sloppy joes or the same meat mixture served on taco chips with cheese and lettuce. There was a salad or two and some chocolate pudding or fresh fruit. They showed a great deal of interest in us and the service was good. The people were a definite cross section with young, old and everything in between (tough for such a small congregation).

When we first checked in, we were given some literature about Delta and the surrounding area. One of the things that interested us was a loop road with some interesting things to do and see. There was a big sink hole and an old miners cabin and some other stuff. The thing that interested us most was a hike up little notch and continuing over a ridge to big notch. We packed some snacks and drinks and headed out. The loop looked like one road that made a loop but one leg of the loop (if loops have legs) was a numbered road that continued on to the Nevada border (about 90 miles away). We drove about 43 miles to get there and got to Skull Rock Pass without seeing the road heading out on the loop. We continued on as the loop came back in right after the pass. We found a small sign that said “Old Route 6 19 M). I remembered seeing a sign that looked about the same but was unreadable. The road was dirt and pretty rough looking. We decided to retrace our steps and find the other end of the road.

We found it. If you stopped and looked at the sign really closely, you could make out “Old Route 6 12 M”. That seemed a lot closer than 19 so we decided to check out the road. Within the first 2 miles, we encountered 2 places where the sand was really soft. We made it through but vowed that we would turn around when we hit the next one. We got to 3 miles without another but started to see a lot of other roads coming and going with no markings. It turns out that this is a desert off road vehicle area and none of the roads were marked. The roads were really washboardy and got rougher and rougher. We saw some mounds off the road and stopped to investigate. They were huge ant hills with dozens of tunnels leading from the top and around the bottom. There were several of these mounds about 20 feet apart. I took some pictures and we set off again. The road got rougher and I decided that the Camry had to make it back to South Berwick so we turned around.

We were disappointed but decided to make up for it the next day. Now to set this up. Are you familiar with the Great Basin National Park? Better yet are you familiar with the Great Basin? You all know about the Continental Divide. If you stand on the Continental Divide and it rains, the water that flows off the western side goes into the Pacific Ocean and the water that flows off the eastern side goes to the Atlantic Ocean. Well, the water that falls into the Great Basin doesn’t go anywhere. It stays in the Great Basin and either goes into one of several brackish lakes, sinks into the ground and joins underground rivers or just evaporates. The Great Salt Lake is part of this basin as is the Salton Sea. This whole area (much of Nevada, Most of Utah, parts of Arizona, New Mexico and California) was once a great sea. The land rose and most of the water left leaving this arid desert and the few bodies of water that still remain. The Bonneville Salt Flats, of racing fame, are part of this old sea bed.

The national park is dedicated to this although its biggest features are the Lehman Caves and Mount Wheeler (13,000 ft). On Mount Wheeler is the most significant part of this because of a small pine tree; the Bristlecone Pine. The Bristlecone Pines are the oldest trees in the world and are found only in alpine areas above 9,000 feet. The main grove of Bristlecones here is found at 10,600 feet. You can drive to 10,000 feet and then take a trail that rises another 600 feet over a mile and a half to the start of the grove. If you have never taken a hike above 10,000 feet it is a real effort, especially for us sea level dwellers. We took our already packed backpack from the day before and drove the 100+ miles to the park.

First we signed up for the cave tour. The cave was really magnificent although not the polished tour that Wind, Jewel and Mammoth Caves are (they also don’t have the traffic). Tours are limited to 20 people as opposed to 60 or 80 at the others. The cave is also pretty much at one level as the others wander through hundreds of feet in elevation change. They do have some unique things though. They have a formation called shields. These are shaped just like the round shields that various warriors used. They are created by water under high pressure coming out from cracks in the walls. I have been in several caves and have never seen this formation before. They have one shield that has stalagtites coming down from it. They call it the “Parachute”. They have a great selection of all of the usual cave items: straws, stalagtites, stalagmites, columns, flowstone and various types of bacon. Unlike the other caves, this one is pretty much on a single level. It goes into the mountain but while there are ups and downs, there is only one level. In other caves you can go up or down several hundred feet by changing levels within the cave structure. Caves like Wind and Mammoth have miles and miles of tunnels striated across levels and stretching for miles. This cave was only about a half mile across and we saw most of the area.

After escaping from the underground, we drove up the road onto Mount Wheeler. This is a 10 mile drive from the visitor’s center up onto the mountain. We stopped at several of the overlooks which looked over the desert below. We crossed the 10,000 foot mark and climbed higher to find a trail head that went to the summit. This was an 8.6 mile trail with 3,000 foot of elevation gain. The road went up from there and finally went down for quite a ways. Soon, we came to the other main trail head. This was also at 10,000 feet and fed several trails to an alpine lakes loop (which also connected to the summit trail), a trail to a glacier (a cirque) which is somewhat depleted but you can see the area created by it, and along the same trail, the Bristlecone Pine grove (1.5 miles and 600 foot elevation gain).

We set out slowly with lots of breaks. The going was difficult and a good breath was hard to find. It got easier as we went on but we still took lots of breaks. The temperature at the trail head was 69 degrees, a big drop from the 120s we have experienced. We put on our sweatshirts, gathered up our water bottles and energy bars (and bug spray) and headed up. It wasn’t long before we took off the sweatshirts. We passed several trail intersections and eventually entered the bristlecone grove. The trees were scattered over the mountainside. Many of them were really old and had lost much of their bark. They were gnarled and were mostly 8 to 12 feet tall. The trunks and branches were twisted and those that had cones had these small purplish cones. There were lots of small trees but they say that even these are really old. Many of the trees in this grove are 3,000 to 4,000 years old. There is one tree here that is 4,900 years old. They won’t tell you which one to protect the tree against souvenir hunters.

They used bristlecone pines to revise the carbon dating system to correct errors in the calculations. Dead trees provide a lot of information too. These trees do not rot. They stay on the mountain basically forever. They are filled with resins and weather like the rocks rather than rot and decompose like other trees and plants. They have tested some of the dead trees to be in excess of 9,000 years old. That boggles my imagination. Many of these trees were old when Christ was born. They are older than the Roman Empire (and the English think we are young and immature because we, as a country, are only slightly more than 200 years old).

When we signed the trailhead register, the couple who signed before us was from Vermont. They signed to go to the alpine lakes trail so we didn’t expect to see them. Wrong again, after completing the loop around the alpine lakes, they continued on to the Bristlecones. We met them there and had a nice chat. They had flown out and were spending their vacation in the area (They were in Ely, NV). They had driven out here on other occasions but decided to spend their time here rather than getting here. It was starting to get late and the sun went down behind the shoulder of Wheeler Mountain. We knew we still had a fair amount of time before real darkness but we headed down the mountain to be safe. We still had to negotiate the 10 miles of mountain road and then the 120 mile return trip to Delta.

We had marked a couple of places along the road that we wanted to stop and photograph so we beat feet for the border and returned to Mountain Daylight Time (the park is in Pacific Daylight Time not to be confused with Arizona which is in Mountain Standard Time). Darkness landed about 40 minutes into the trip. The smokey haze from the fires in California gave us a great sunset. We stopped and took a couple of pictures of that.

We had seen several deer on our decent of the mountain. We stopped and watched them for a while and snapped some pix. After we hit the desert, we saw a group of 3 prong horn antelope and a family of some animal that we didn’t recognize. They were a yellow/tan, looked like a cat but had a naked tail and were the size of a smallish fox. It could have been a fox but it didn’t have a bushy tail. I have tried to look it up on the internet and have not been successful.

Once the sun went down, it got very dark. The road was straight. There were no lights or poles or wires or anything. There was a 3 to 4 foot drop off either side of the road and there was, for all practical purposes, no traffic. The speed limit was 70 and in the dark, you basically put everything on cruise control and just hung on. You would only see another vehicle every 15 or 20 minutes. The land was so dark you had no references other than the white lines on either side of the road. It was difficult but eventually, we made it home.

We got up late the next morning and headed for Salt Lake City. We took the back road and drove up along Utah Lake. There wasn’t much built up around the lake and we wondered if this was another salt lake since we are still in the Great Basin. We pulled into Salt Lake City with the intention of visiting the Mormon Temple complex. This is the heart of the city and the reason the city was built. We got off the highway in the center of the city and followed the signs for Temple Square except that either the signs petered out or we made a wrong turn. We drove around for quite a while and finally followed signs for the state house as it was in the same neighborhood. We finally parked the car and set out on foot. We saw a young family that stopped to read every plaque along the road so we hoped they knew were they were going and followed them right into the Temple Complex.

I had been here on kind of a whirlwind tour many years ago when traveling with some people from work. We had a 5 ½ hour layover in Salt Lake City and rented a car and did the 25 cent tour. Nothing was as I remembered it. The Mormon complex consisted of many buildings, most of which were here then and the one building that I remembered touring is not open to the public. Things may have changed since then but I am confused.

We wandered into one of the visitor’s centers and were pointed right to a tour leaving in just 4 minutes. They have an interesting setup. They bring in young girls from all over the world for 18 months. These girls are the tour guides for the main part of the complex. They are paired up; ours were from Argentina and Armenia. They are known as Sisters. They give you a tour but with a heavy dose of Mormon religion. They will tell you a couple of things about a building and then 5 minutes of religious teachings. The sisters all carry their “Book of Mormon” and continually refer to their prophets and apostles. The Tabernacle was built in the mid 1800s over a period of 4 years. Considering the technology of the time, the acoustics in the building are excellent. They do a demonstration periodically where the demonstrator stands at the pulpit and tears a piece of newsprint. You can hear it everywhere in the hall. That is followed by the dropping of 3 pins and a small nail. You can clearly hear the noise of the pins hitting followed by the clank of the small nail. We toured the next building where they have a beautiful statue of Jesus in a rotunda with stars and the heavens all around. You get to this room by climbing a rampway adorned by huge paintings portraying the New Testament. Behind this is another set of paintings portraying scenes from the Old Testament.

They have pictures of Jesus with the Indians of this hemisphere and have a belief that during the time after he rose, he visited the Americas. I had never heard this before. After this tour, we went to another building and had lunch then headed for the new (2000) Conference Center. This is an amazing feat of architecture. The hall seats 21,000 people and there is not a post in sight. There is an organ at the back of the huge stage that has 7,000 pipes. This is the summer home of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They move over here from the Tabernacle to seat the crowds that show up with the summer tourism season. The Choir practices here on Thursday nights (open to the public). The Sunday service (I am not sure it is really a service, just a concert with a few words) is called the “Spoken Word” but is really a 30 minute radio broadcast of the choir. It is open to the public unlike many of their other services there.

On top of the conference center is a roof garden which provides a great view of the city. They have fountains and grasses and trees and flowers. They also use the gardens to hide several pyramid shaped skylights. It is rather striking. Our tour of the conference center was done by a woman named Kathe. It worked out to be a private tour as we were the only ones she took. She showed us the art work in the building and the building itself. She spent a lot of time with us and told us it was really nice to do one of these tours with just 2 people. Her earlier groups were much larger. In contrast to everyone that was so nice and friendly (too friendly), there was one man giving a tour in the conference center that barged into our elevator as the doors were closing. He did not excuse himself but lined his people up in front of us. When the elevator doors opened, he hurried them out and through the glass doors onto the roof. When the last of “his” people went through the glass doors (I was right behind them), he let the door slam in my face totally ignoring me. His name tag said he was one of the Elders of the church. ???

It was getting late so we headed down the street towards our car and headed back to camp. Another 2 + hour trip. We were pretty beat the next morning. We got up late then headed over to the post office. Both of the packages we were looking for were in. Then we headed over to the fabric shop that was right next to the church we went to. We made arrangements to get propane for the camper. Its been so hot we have hardly used any propane. We have been cooking outside and using electricity to run the refrigerator except when we are on the road.

I worked on the steps and have them working a lot better. They are not perfect but at least they go all the way in and most of the way out. Of course, now that I fixed the steps something else will undoubtedly break…..While I was typing that, the TV went out. I fooled around with it for a while but it tells me that the antenna is disconnected. I have checked every connection that I can reach. Anything else will be more difficult.

Well, tomorrow is travel day. This has been an interesting stop, certainly more than we had anticipated. The weather has been great, a respite from the heat. We will be off mid morning, stopping to fill the propane. This next week will be a real busy one. There are 5 national parks in the area we will be: Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands and Capital Reef (never heard of this one before this week but it is right around the corner from our campground). We will try to keep up.