Day 4 - Ely to Cedar City (UT) - 222 miles
Day 4 - Ely to Cedar City (UT) - 222 milesBeing in the middle nowhere is an interesting experience. Now and again you see the dust trail of some rancher off in the desert. Occasionally you pass a car going the other way.
The route to Cedar City took us down (the inaccurately named) Lake Valley. 120 miles of nothingness. Being used to the squashed together landscape of Europe, this was a strange sensation, but very pleasant, and driving across this sort of terrain is extremely relaxing. So relaxing that I drove for 60 miles without using my hands. The miles roll on beneath you and, despite having the intercomms, we didn't chat much, preferring to enjoy the peace.
We got more petrol at Pioche.
Pioche was a pleasant surprise. Unlike many towns in Nevada, you can actually imagine yourself going there (as opposed to "passing through"). It is a mining town, nestled in the pink hills, with authentic looking "I've been here for over 100 years" buildings.
Patrick and I concluded that the silver mined here must be related to the pinkness of the hills in some way. A great deal of Nevada is pink.
The next town we came across was Panaca, a peculiar one street town. At one corner, there was a parade float with a giant papier mâché cockerel on it. There was also one of those interesting "Historical Marker" plaques, which we stopped to read. Panaca had a strange history of being in Utah and Nevada at the same time. Apparently they had had some difficulty with where the stateline actually was. As soon as Utah started to try and make them pay taxes, they suddenly became Nevadan, which, conveniently they had been in the first place.
"Nevada" is not pronounced the way I pronounce it, Patrick tells me. So during quiet times while travelling across the state, I practised saying it the "proper way". Well, I tried. The "a" sound in the middle is pronounced "a", as in "Ducati". All I had to do was pronounce it "Nevati" and ignore the fact that that wasn't the name of the state. I still can't say it, despite spending many days there.
We dropped down out of the hills, over the Utah border and,
amidst great excitement, found a 21
Our arrival in Cedar City was celebrated by me getting a bee down my boot and swerving all over the road to try and stop and get it out. When it gets really hot, I wear my ten year old Sidi boots loose for maximum air scoopage. Unfortunately, this also makes for maximum biting/stinging insect scoopage as well. It is always very interesting at the end of the day to see what new beastie is squashed into my socks. I don't mind when they get squashed on my socks, but I do mind when they get down there and are still alive (and pissed off) and crawl up my trouser leg.
Cedar City is a thriving metropolis and we quickly found "Ron's Sporting Goods and Honda Dealer". On display were lots of tasteful photos of people holding up dead wildlife, shot, no doubt, with their "sporting goods". We established that they were open the following day and retired to a motel.
Day 5 - Cedar City to Red Canyon - 80 milesThings got off to a bad start when "Honda dealer" Ron asked us what a CB-1 was, and then refused to believe us when we told him that it wasn't a grey import. Trying to find a tyre this size (140-70/17) is about as easy as finding a pair of six fingered gloves made of otter skin. Ron finally located us a suitable Bridgestone somewhere in Florida (which was about to be struck by Hurrican Erin). Visions of being shackled to Cedar City for the rest of our holiday loomed large in our minds.
Desperate plans of sticking a tubes in it, or plugging it with the BMW repair kit we'd brought along, began to surface, when suddenly Eagle Eye Patrick spotted a 130-80/17 lurking on the tyre racks. It was a Dunlop K591 which tend to be on the big size and so it would fit perfectly. Mental sighs of relief all round.
Patrick and I huddled under a spindley bush in the 98°F
(37°C) heat while the mechanic swapped the
tyres over and within a couple
of hours we were off again having only lost half a day. Yay.
18 miles out of Cedar City, we were at 9900'. The CB-1 gets a tad puffy at such elevations, necessitating dropping a couple of gears and trying to avoid losing speed. It will still go along quite happily - you just need to drive it with more enthusiasm than normal, particularly with a camping load.
We did our touristy duty and inspected Cedar Breaks (this is a link to a someone else's 160k picture of Cedar Breaks. We did take pictures when we were there, but all they show is me extracting insects from a boot), an amazing canyon of brightly coloured rock formations that look like giant rubber glove fingers filled with water. Sort of.
We frolicked excitedly at 10467' (3191m), the highest either bike has ever gone, until an irresponsible passerby told us that Brian Head, the highest point in Southern Utah at 11307' (3447m), was just up the road and there was a road leading up to the top of it. Joy.
Holiday Lesson # 43: Do not let Lucy ride up mountains, because she won't necessarily be able to get down them again.
The "road" leading up to the top of Brian Head turned out to be a gravel goat track, and on fully laden bikes, was a nightmare. It took a good 200m before this fact fully registered in my altitude-befuddled brain. Patrick, on the expensively plastic covered f2, was far quicker on the uptake - it only took him 7 seconds to deduce that this was a "bad thing".
We got to the top without mishap and were disappointed to discover no elevation sign (just the remains of the post), and therefore no proof of our feat. Sigh. And I nearly managed to get down again without mishap. Nearly.
It is surprising how quickly things go wrong. One minute I'm jarring over the gravel, swerving to avoid cuddley marmots, potholes, and troughs, the next minute the fully laden CB-1 was lying on its side, practically upside down, hanging off the edge of the road.
We scrabbled around and got it upright without losing it over the edge and were relieved to discover only a bent indicator and scratched engine cover. I didn't even damage the pizza bungeed to the back. My magnetic tank bag had fallen off and I kept trying to brush off the grit so I could put it back on. The snag was, the "grit" was actually iron filings, and as such almost impossible to remove. I ended up having to pinch them off. But it gives an idea as to how much iron is in the soil.
Later trips on bad surfaces made me realise that when things start to go wrong, I tend to look at the ground 6" in front of the bike and, in extremely exciting circumstances, accelerate. I think this might have something to do with gripping the handlebars very tightly. Either way, it isn't much help.
Oh well. We live and learn (she said wisely, doing neither.)
I always drive dead slowly after dropping a bike. I think you suddenly realise that the ground is "just down there" and feel a bit vulnerable. We chugged through Dixie National forest (me trying to work out the connection between "Dixie National Forest" and "dixie cups" which are little paper cups you wee into at the doctors), aiming at a campsite listed in my AAA book in Red Canyon.
The campsite turned out to be a nasty RV campsite, with nasty hard ground and not at all cosy. I pushed my luck and persuaded the already tired Patrick to "just go on to Bryce Canyon and camp in the park" 15 miles up the road. (all the while thinking "oh God, it'll be full and we'll have to drive around all night looking for a campsite").
Two miles up the road we came across the real Red Canyon campsite, which is possibly one of the nicest I've ever stayed at. Red Canyon was aptly named, being both a canyon and red, and it was filled with yet more rubber glove finger formations. The campsite was run by the Forest Service.
Our sumptuous palace, modelled here by the lovely Patrick (in the tent), with the rubber glove fingers of Red Canyon in the background.
The Forest Service has the most ace campsites. They actually try to make your stay pleasant and rustic. They put them in the best places and you have the most wondrous views out of your tent.They usually cost about 20p. This time, we got to gaze upon the pointed red fingers across the canyon and watch the strange shadows as the sun went down.
Camping in America is different. For one thing, they call campsites "campgrounds" (the site is the actual plot where you put your tent). But then they never could speak the language properly:
Gone are the days of trying to balance precarious saucepans of boiling water on a two and half inch diameter gas cooker, singeing your eyebrows every time you try to light it. Now you can eat meals delicately flavoured with woodsmoke, and drink delicious coffee with little black bits floating in it (in France they feed you charcoal tablets when you have an upset stomach. It's good for you). The wood is so dry it bursts into flames at the slightest provocation (see " Day 7 - Natural Bridges") and you can sit by the fire in the evening and watch the flickering flames (as opposed to having to huddle in the tent, making sure nothing touches the sides to prevent any rain coming in and praying the tent won't give out in the night and start to leak copiously).
Camping in the US is definitely a different experience.
We pitched our tent, using Patrick's innovative tent pegs (various shaped screwdriver bodies, which all fit in one handle) and unravelled the bed. In an effort to keep weight down, we use self-inflating air matresses, for which I'd sewn a double cover, so that they would be held together (I'd gotten really fed up of waking up in the night, lying on the cold ground in the gap between the two matresses) and this meant that we only needed one sleeping bag, which we could use like a duvet. The tent has a front porch, which we fill with bags, boots, helmets, etc, although our leathers usually end up in the tent with us.
Something we had been warned about - leaving the helmets and boots in the porch does mean you have to check for nasty insects/scorpions in the morning.
We shackled the two bikes together to make it more difficult for the
ring of bike thieves (surely lurking in this rural part of Utah) to
steal one or other of them and settled down to reheat the pizza
over the fire. This was more successful than we hoped and we were
glad we'd bothered to drag it across the country on the back of
the bike.
Day 6 - Red Canyon to Torrey - 140 milesWe spent the morning sitting in the sun, reading/drawing and eventually managed to get going around 1pm. That's more like it.
We decided to miss out Bryce Canyon (and try and visit it on the way back, if we had time) and instead go and play on hw-12, which we'd been told was voted one of the best roads in the western US.
What we hadn't expected was that Utah had decided to resurface it. Not, of course, with smooth black tarmac, but with loose gravel vaguely stuck to the road with tar. So instead of getting to zip along what was the first proper twisty we'd been on, I drove along it carefully, convinced that I'd be off on the next bend.
We stopped to buy lunch in Escalante and got caught in a summer
downpour. These were quite common the entire time we were in
Southern Utah. The route, up until that point had been "quite"
interesting, with lots of bizarrely coloured mesas off in the
distance, but we still didn't feel it warranted its "best road"
reputation. We decided that maybe we might be more wowed if the sun
had been out.
The rain swept over and was rapidly replaced by bright sunshine.
A few miles out of Escalante we discovered that its reputation was not unfounded. We came around a corner and came across a view that was, quite literally, breathtaking. We just sat there on our bikes, engines running, sun beating down, mouths open.
It wasn't even worth taking a photo of because you wouldn't be able to come close to representing it. What was spread out in front of us was, effectively, the southwest corner of Utah. An area of about 4500 miles - of huge canyons and mesas and mountains. With the most amazing array of colours possible.
After several minutes of this, we discovered that sitting in the sun in full leathers, with central heating thoughtfully provided by bike engines wasn't such a good idea and we set off across the plain. Hw-12 wiggles along, climbing up the side of mesas where necessary (and at one point running along the top of a narrow ridge with sheer drops either side. The trick is to look at the views without falling off the road and it isn't that easy under those circumstances.)
The road wound around back into another section of Dixie National Forest which was on 11000' (3350m) Boulder Mountain. This is what was so odd about the area. One minute you'd be driving across a dry rocky wash and a few miles later you'd be up on the lush wooded mountainside.
We debated spending the night in one of the campsites on the mountain at 9200' (2800m), but decided it would be chilly and opted instead to staying down at 5000' (1525m) in Capitol Reef National Park.
Well, that was the plan, anyway. What we hadn't banked on was the campsite being completely full. By this time, we were back in desert area - nothing but dry red rock and sheer red cliffs as far as the eye can see. The sun was setting and soon it would be dark. Time to resort to Plan B.
We backtracked towards Torrey and came across a shingle-covered motel just outside the park boundary. I was duly sent in to barter.
Patrick, being an upstanding American, doesn't like to haggle, but, being a cheapskate, I'm quite good at it and the resulting reduction in price of motel rooms can be quite startling. In this case, I'd decided that, despite our predicament, I was willing to pay no more than $50 for a room.
It turned out we were in luck, in a roundabout way.
The motel had one room left for $55. Too high for my cap. But I was
offered the alternative of
$10 to camp, in a completely deserted campsite, complete with
showers (like something from a swedish porn film - all varnished
wood) and a pool, old emigrant wagons lying about, and a
spectacular view of the setting sun against the red cliffs of
Capitol Reef.
We did have to fight off some ants, though. I tell you, it's hard camping in the US.
| Utah Intro | Specification
| Day 1 of the Trip | Day
2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day
5 | Day 6 |
| Day 7 | Day 8 |
Day 9 | Day 10 |
Day 11 | Day
12 | Day 13 | Day
14 |
elsie@calweb.com 30 August 1995
