On the Trail of The Lonesome Pine

Wednesday 3rd October
The problem with being out of Internet range is that you forget where you are with the blog!. We have now been out of range for over a week, so I am not sure where I should pick up from.

Sally has not been too well, having had a throat infection, which was cured by the doctor in Escalante on Monday with a shot in the bum (antibiotics). This left her feeling pretty exhausted, so we rested at the Petrified Forest State Park until Wednesday. We left Escalante to tackle what I feel is the central challenge of our trip this Fall – Capitol Reef, particularly a feature called the Waterpocket Fold.

This is one of the most remote parts of Utah, which is in itself one of the most remote parts of the USA, so it is pretty remote. Mostly accessible via dirt roads which, although we are able to ride on because of our high clearance, are pretty uncomfortable for two reasons: potholes (self-explanatory) and washboarding. Washboarding is a cruel trick of road maintenance and loose sand/dust on the road. Every so often a road scraper will pass over dirt roads levelling them out; unfortunately they leave a sort of ripple effect on the road surface, which repeated scrapings makes worse. These ripples are like the little waves that form on a sand beach, except they are between 6 inches and a foot in wavelength and anything up to 2 inches high. There are two ways to tackle them – either at 5 mph, carefully traversing each ripple, which is safe but bumpy, or at a speed between 30 and 40 mph, when you go so fast the suspension lets you just glide over them, a process I have now named ‘Washboard Surfing’, which is OK until you either meet a corner, a downhill or a pothole. Braking on washboarding is an invitation to dig the wheels into the washboarding and you wipeout in a terrifying cacophony of every panel of the van banging away and everything loose inside bouncing around and threatening to perform short bursts of freefall acrobatics. Navigating washboarding has the feeling of trying to land a space shuttle, you know where you want to go, but you are trusting to luck to get there in one piece, because you have very little control of what is happening. Hitting a pothole is self explanatory. Trouble is when you have dirt roads that may be fifty miles long the 5mph option is not really an option. So you drive on a knife-edge with the spectre of wipeout with every approaching hazard.

I digress. To reach the inner parts of the Waterpocket Fold we needed a base camp, the only suitable place, that we could plan, is a small pull off about 5 miles down the Burr Trail Road. A place marked by a large lone Ponderosa Pine (as described by the Forest Ranger at the visitor center in Escalante). We set out from Escalante on Wednesday 3rd October. We drove up route 12. Another spectacular section of road taking us through more ravines. We turned off route 12 at Boulder, onto the Burr Trail and surprise, surprise, found the pull off with its Lone Ponderosa Pine, just about lunch time. Here we camped, alone, in the middle of the desert, in the dark, where there might be bears, or robbers, or scorpions. We enjoyed the solitude and the warm weather, Sally continued to be exhausted, but recovering, so we sat for the rest of the day here just enjoying the peace.

Couldn't not include this very unlikely hit in the UK in 1975, it would have reached number 1, but for Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody: