#379 Sand Island Campground ,Blanding, UT

To go back a little I was at a recovery meeting in Denver and while shooting the breeze I got some travel tips from a guy there. He was the nicest guy who told me all about Utah. and I had told him that we were thinking about staying on the big interstate and going over towards St George and then down kind of towards Las Vegas. I asked would it be a good idea to go left at Moab and go down and he said absolutely, we should do that instead.

He told me of things we might see after Moab. Here are the notes I took from the conversation.

1) Go south to Blanding and then left to Natural Bridges

2) Valley of the Gods

3) Goosenecks of the San Juan

4) Moki dugway

5) Mexican Hat then back up north to Blanding

We found a National Forest BLM-type place called Sand Island and it also mentioned they had petroglyphs there. I found it on free camp.net and it would be the next stop. When we arrived I was a little intimidated because we were way up high and it was below via a small one-lane road down a fairly steep hill. I said okay, I'll just take it easy but it was pretty creepy. I went over towards what looked like an office for the National Forest but there wasn't a lot of activity over there. I saw some sites but were very small for like 15-ft rigs. I rode around and realized big rigs we were supposed to be over there by the Petroglyphs.

With what I had learned at Ken's lake about having our front door facing the east I used this method to pick It's the best campground site. The layout of the camping area was about 10 to 15 sites in the typical cul-de-sac pattern. I took a look at my compass and found east and made some effort to make that line up with my front door. I worked with parking with the east orientation and finally, I realized this isn't the best site so I tried another one down the way and it was just right. Keep in mind the temperatures were pretty warm in the afternoon between 90 and 100 and we’re boondocking. The way you park will make it either good or miserable so it's pretty important.

I got settled in and for my next effort, we needed to run the generator a little bit to cool off using the air conditioner. India and I were tooling around and she said that she got bit by a black ant of some sort. I thought that was a little weird because fire ants bite or sting but I wasn't so familiar with other kinds of ants biting. She would tell you differently and said it hurt and didn't like it or me very much for a while. We put some ammonia on it and that typically calms down any insect bite.

Ever since Denver, I had realized that there was something wrong with the cord that was going to the generator so to stay cool I had to use a 14-gauge wire that had a 120-volt plug on both ends. Plugging it into the generator and connecting it to shore power using adapters most the only way to use the generator. It was ideal but it worked. In the evenings we use the inverter watch which is also acting ridiculous. It wasn't obeying the push button from inside the room so I had to go out and do it manually. Even though these are problems I had to be grateful that it worked, just not as designed.

In the evening we went out looking for a restaurant and we found a place but it was the only place within 20 miles so lower your expectations.

The next day would be our first day of exploring. We went out later in the day and drove towards the Valley of the Gods. What I know now is that you enter into the Valley of Gods down a dirt road from a remote highway. There were a whole lot of interesting rock formations that kind of reminded me of Monument Valley.

After doing some research I realized there was a good reason why. If you go this way for a while and I mean like 20 miles of dirt road you'll end up at Monument Valley and so they do look very similar. Monument has a lot more iconic formations used in almost every John Wayne-type western movie.

We took a right turn off the main road and started looking around. I saw people a few people boondocking here and it might be appealing for small campers but for one my size it might be a bit much. It was a one-lane curvy twisty turny and not many large turnouts.

We drove in several miles and were amazed at how remote it was. I felt like the people out here are loners but I’m sure they were happy doing it their way. I took a video

of how weird it is to be so far away from everything It was neat place but at some point, I had decided I did not want to drive 20 miles down a dirt road to end up on the other side. We turned around and headed back out to the road. Goosenecks of the San Juan would be our next stop. We followed the directions to the entrance of the State Park. We thought that it was going to be one of those 10-mile lazy loop scenic drives. I went up to the pay station which was unattended and put in the 5.00 P which was half-off because they offered a senior discount. So it was actually not a state park it was a federal recreation area. I knew that no one would ever know different if we didn’t pay but I just felt like it was the right thing to do as it was the honor system. There was no camping but I could see some folks were boondocking in the area but no one was around to care. I pulled forward and found out that 100 more feet were where the park road ended at a cliff. I was a little bit surprised but they've got to make their money too.

So fine this is from the web but it was really pretty

The San Juan River wanders through this area eons ago and started doing a bunch of oxbow-type curves. The river would come at you and go almost backward 180 degrees back and forth like this about four times. Each time the peninsula. came at you it kind of looks like a gooseneck. There is a smaller version of this up in Lake Powell called Horseshoe Bend. It's such a cool formation that people really come from here and there to hike up to it and yet this was horseshoe bend times 4. I took a lot of pictures and it was very nice and we headed out.

When we got to a right turn, we saw the most beautiful mountains that I will call Navajo blanket. The entire mountain looked exactly like a Navajo blanket and it should be pretty obvious by now where the indigenous people got their design work ideas.

I enjoyed looking at the mountain and documented it with my camera. Next, we would take a ride heading towards the town of Mexican Hat. If there is a town it can't be much more than a gas station but we got towards the rock formation and initially, I said I don't see it. As you come closer around a certain corner it's really cool It kind of does look like something and when we got closer, we realized oh my god it is the Mexican hat.

It looks just like somebody like a Jolly Green Giant took off their sombrero hat and laid it down upside down on top of a rock. We didn’t drive into the town called Mexican Hat but we did kind of a lot of laps around the rock. Somebody was boondocking there and that was about it for that day's adventure and we headed back to Sand Island Campground.

The next day's adventure was to do the rest of the things on my list. First, we went up towards Natural Bridges, and then we realized that Moki Dugway was on the way.

It would be worth mentioning that I had no idea what it was but it was some sort of rock formation that you drive near or through or by. We got closer and closer to it and I noticed that the highway was getting ready to dead-end into an enormous wall of rock that seemed to be several thousand ft high. I figured well maybe this rock wall formation thing is related to the Moki. The GPS said we were about there so I thought when you got to this Moki thing you could stay on the highway or you could take the exit and enjoy the Moki dugway.

I could not have been more wrong about this assumption. As we got closer to this giant wall of rock it said warning no big rigs, warning 10% grade, warning, Nothing over 40 feet, warning you are so screwed.

I thought it’s all good because it’s not like I’ve got the RV behind me. We proceeded and the normal highway sort of turned into an up-the-hill kind of 45° dirt road. It was two-lane but not much wider than two cars. I would quickly find out that the Moki Dugway is a series of switchbacks that gets you up and over this wall of rock. The only problem is there's no shoulder of any kind or guardrails of any kind. As you are going up and you look to your right you're on a dirt road that has been graded and there's a little hump of dirt right at the edge of it. This little mound of dirt is all there is between you and a steep cliff to your demise. It's just exactly the size of two cars and so a dually makes you feel like you're too big but you know unfortunately to your right is like a 300-ft drop. I kind of thought I'm in it now so we would go very slowly I remember going about 10 miles an hour and being so incredibly scared. We kept saying oh my god just hang on, hang on but it was pretty terrifying. Once you start there is no turning around and you’re not going to go back in reverse so you have to suck it up and get done. I was really hoping I would not meet another car and yet we did and we gave them all the room we could but I didn't want to get too close to the edge. They looked at me and I looked at them and we laughed like oh my god what have we done?

I didn't count but I would imagine that was about eight of these switchbacks and each time it felt like you were going 45 degrees of a steep hill and then the same back and forth. We finally got to the top and it leveled out and I looked and there were a few cars that had fallen off the cliff. Maybe they left there because it was too hard to retrieve. It finally cleaned up and we were on a normal highway again. We said no matter what we do we never want to be that scared again. This is just an example of how you could check the internet a little more before you jump into something.

From here we went on to Natural Bridges which I had never heard of unless vaguely. It was a national monument that consisted of about five natural bridges that had been formed by the river water cutting under. The visitor center was closed so I tried to gather as much information as I could. There was no signal out there so I tried to download maps the best I could. It was about a 10-mile lazy loop. We drove all around and saw all the natural bridges and much like up in arches I began to see lots of cool figures in the rocks and took tons of pictures of such things.

We just had the best time and did a nice hike and I got lots of pictures of all the interesting creatures living in the rocks. It was amazing. After this, we went back towards Blanding, got a bite to eat, and went home.

The next day would be the day that we leave Sand Creek and wow, we hadn't seen the petroglyphs yet. I drove the truck up to that area and I realized quickly it wasn't that far from where the RV was. We stood there and I took as many pictures as I could trying to document the characters drawn everywhere. I wanted to make sure I got a good feel of it and walked up and got close and personal to it or as close as the fence would allow. It was a wonderful feeling of being here where people had been making these interesting stories on the wall maybe thousands of years ago. I don't know for sure but I loved it and I had a close call because when I got back home I noticed that none of the pictures that I took were coming out. There was no record of it.

I found some of the pictures on photos online. My good son Ben at a later date showed me how to recover the information that was on the SanDisk. The SD card was in the camera. They had been erased but not gone forever. It was so cool because of how he was able to recover the information. I was able to get my pictures back and I was always so grateful to Ben. He has many talents in this area. Having seen the Petroglyphs, we were on to our next stop.