After Spending few relaxing days in the Fish Lake national forest, we got itchy feet again and hit the road! The plan was to visit few spot that are less visited in Utah and explore them.
We headed toward Torrey and camped on the edge of the Capital Reef National Park somewhere in the desert. At that stage, we haven’t had Starlink yet and still had the problem of finding a wild camp with good cell service when we had to work. That night we ended up in a very exposed location to the wind because the cell coverage was reasonable. The wind got worse over night and we ended up waking up before 5:00 am and leave! That ended up to be great because we had so much to see for the day and a lot of offroad ahead of us.
The Capital Reef National Park is an interesting place. It’s pretty narrow and long. It doesn’t have an entrance gate, where they normally check your pass or sell tickets. It’s only a sign on the southern side of the park that we are entering the national park. Our point of interests were all offroads, either on the edge of the park or outside the park with the only access available from inside the park. Since we didn’t have enough sleep the night before and started early we had a lot of time to visit our places of interest and explore even more.
The first stop on the list was Bentonite hills. The hills are on the edge of the park boundary and outside the park. It requires a 4WD and when we were there, we were the only ones. The colors of the hills with the hues of brown, red, purple, gray and white is simply out of this world.
The next stop for the day was Cathedral Valley. Located in the northern part of the Capital reef, it’s fairly remote and requires high clearance vehicle. In June, when we visited, the dirt roads where generally ok with some tricky sections but in the wet months of the year, it can be a challenge to navigate this road. We’ve only seen few cars at the end of the road and we were on our own for the most of the day which makes it a bit tricky if a car get stuck and needs to be recovered. But it is stunning. The rock formations are so beautiful that makes it hard to believe that they are real. We got lucky and had a cloudy day which helped with the heat and also made the lights and scenery even more beautiful. Without any doubts, these two locations were some of the bests we’ve seen in all of Utah!
After trying to get lost for hours in the maze of dirt roads in the area, it was time to find a decent place to camp. When we visited in June, it was getting pretty hot in the afternoons, so we found a national forest on the northern side of the Capital reef and specifically found a lake to camp by.
It was getting late and we were gaining elevation on a very bumpy dirt road. Finding these camp spots are always a gamble. You drive for hours on a dirt road and you find that there’s nothing like what you imagined or the spot is already taken by others but that night we were lucky.
After driving from 5 am and no sleep the night before, we found a perfect spot. High in the mountain with green aspen trees and plenty of fire wood, we found a camp spot by a lake!
Some local fishermen came to fish in the lake just before sunset and left. We had a great campfire and a hearty meal to wrap up our day.
The plan for the next day was getting to some random places that I had on my list and they were all very close to each other.
We woke up pretty early to get the most of the cool morning. Even at 8 am we got stopped by two cyclists on the road who were asking for some water because they already ran out of water due to the heat on the road.
All of the places we had on our list were conveniently located on the highway 24, between Caineville and Hanksville.
The first one on the list was Swing Arm city, It’s a big recreational area, famous for OHV, ATV and motorbike offroad trails in another Mars like environment. It’s also a great place for dispersed camping especially if it’s during the quiet months of the year. Again in June, where we visited, we were the only one. We drove around the area for a bit and left for the second spot, the factory Butte. It’s almost 2000m high butte which looks amazing in the desert. It’s a popular spot for seeing Cacti blooming in early spring, but it was beautiful in the summer too. It was also conveniently located on the dirt road toward our next destination of the day, the moon overlook! Another great spot to see a moon like terrain from a great view point. Also a great camp spot with a view and great night sky. We had to move on faster to be able to visit the rest of Utah before the heat gets unbearable so we admired the view and moved to the last spot for the day.
It was already mid day when we left moon overlook and the heat was unbearable. The next spot on the list, before getting to Hanksville was Long Dong Silver! I first saw it in a video and took me a while to find it on the map! It’s a unique rock formation that we definitely wanted to visit. By the time we got to the trailhead, we realized that they changed the access point and now it’s more that an hour walk to our point of interest which meant two hours return. It was just too hot for us to take a two hour walk under the mid day sun and we had to skip it unfortunately. The best we could do was taking another dirt road to get as close as possible to it and send the drone up over the high hills to see it! We both felt gutted that we haven’t seen it up close so we stopped in the next town for an ice cream to finish up the day on a sweet tone 🙂
The next task of the day was finding a camp site high up in the mountains to skip the heat. And to our surprise in Utah, you just need to look around. It’s easy to find a mountain with trees to climb and find a perfect camp spot. That night we found a camp spot by a lake and got our first Trout of the trip too!
In the next post, we continue to the south east corner of Utah before keep heading north to skip the heat. Till then, take care.
Michael Chernishov
October 31, 2024 at 3:27amWoW! Incredible scenery. You two are having a blast! Enjoying your updates.
Azadeh
November 5, 2024 at 9:51pmThanks Michael for your kind comment.