Day 19
For our rest day, we moved as little as possible. We stayed around the campground, watched movies, and ate. We went to the grocery store, an expensive one because this was a tourist town, and bought a bunch of hot dogs and a few other snacks. We returned to the campsite and didn’t leave for the rest of the day. We did some much needed laundry and talked to the owner about his collection of mountain bikes and took a few for test rides. There was rare rain forecasted which meant we had to wait for the gaps to start our hotdog fire. Eventually we gave in just did whatever we could with the damp wood. We put our things in a shelter and huddled in with our hot dogs and ate away the afternoon with as little movement as possible.
Day 20
The rest prepared us for a tough stretch coming up. Fortunately, it had incredible scenery and was the last stretch that lacked towns and resources along the way.
The town of Torrey is situated just outside of Capitol Reef National Park. We climbed a small hill and immediately descended into the park. We cruised through the canyons but knew we had to continue. We made a few stops for pictures and had a lunch stop where we admired the huge rock formations around us.
After leaving the park, we traveled through farm and ranch land. Mesas rose above the road on both sides with UTV tracks through the hills beneath them. We got to the town of Hanksville, the last real town for about 140 miles. We stocked up at the grocery store and stopped for burgers at a hometown fast food restaurant.
While in Hanksville, we saw fliers for a mars rover competition. We went by a motel and ran into a team setting up for it. The group of college students had designed and built nearly every piece of their rover which was meant to perform a few complex tasks. The competition was done by the Mars Institute which is somewhat affiliated with NASA. They use this area because the terrain is very similar to Mars. Unfortunately EMU doesn’t have anything close to the resources to do this kind of project...
After Hanksville, we had a 50 mile trek through the desert to Hite, a “town” consisting of 3 houses, an RV Park that had a limited hours grocery store, and a rangers station. The town was mostly based around tourism for the lake (which is totally dried up at this time of the year).
The last stretch took us into the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. We rode through a canyon that got deeper and deeper until it came uponan expansive canyon carved out by the Colorado River. No, this is not the Grand Canyon... but it was the same river and a still quite impressive canyon. We descended around the walls and crossed the river. After a steep final climb, the worst thing at the end of a long day, we finally hit the sign for Hite,
After 100 miles in the day, we finally arrived at Hite. We filled up on water and used the bathroom at the rangers station and then found the campsite. We were surprised to see another set of touring bikes at the only other occupied campsite. We talked to them briefly and found out they were a retired couple from Brazil. The wife didn’t speak any English and the husband had just enough to get by. They were doing the same route we were. They had come from the last town that day. They were horrified when we told them that we had done a hundred miles and started around 10am (we were also pretty unimpressed with ourselves). We paid the price by arriving at 9pm. We quickly made our dinner of beans and set up our beds. After showers from a hose spigot, we were ready for the next day, 90 miles to the next town. Jonatan and David set up sleeping bags directly on top of picnic tables. It was much warmer than the cold nights we had been having so we were able to comfortably sleep under the stars. We looked up and were excited to see an incredibly clear sky with almost no lights around us to overpower the stars. We looked forward to an incredible view and then remembered that stupid old moon. It was full so it waited to come out until after the sun was down. It was incredibly bright and pretty much ruined the sky. It also made it harder to sleep because it was so bright. Despite the moon, this was still one of the most beautiful places we had slept.
Day 21
We woke up to a clear blue sky. The brazilian couple had already left. We had gotten up a little earlier than normal because of the huge day ahead of us. We had 90 miles with nearly 8000 feet of climbing. We took our things up to the rangers station where we could eat and use the bathroom and prepare our things in the shade.
We started our journey through what was left of the canyonlands area of Utah. Not long into our journey, we met a guy who was probably about 10 years older than us. He was doing a tour around Utah by himself. He did these when he had time between jobs. He was planning this to be the last one on his old bike. He had camped out on the side of the road the night before and was going in the opposite direction. He told us that there was water at the rangers station halfway through our ride. Without his confirmation, we may not have gone and there was no cell service to look it up. We continued the slow grind through the hot sun that took us up and down and around canyons full of cedar trees.
A while later, we passed a girl who was about 5 years older than us. She had started only about 200 miles away and had spent the last two weeks going in and out of every dirt and gravel back road on her way this direction. She gave us some good warnings: the water was 5 miles off the road and we would have to go downhill to get it and there are a lot of bulls in this county and they can be aggressive if you ride by them. She had run into the Brazilian couple who we were expecting to catch up to at some point.
With the hot sun, we were running through water a lot faster than normal. We each went through almost all of our 1 gallon+ supply by the time we got to the halfway point. We got to the entrance to National Bridges National Monument and were very ready for more water. Fortunately. this also marked one of the highest elevation points of the day so we got a downhill afterwards. We went down the hill to the park visitor center and filled up on water. We also took time to rest and eat before our last 45 miles. We took the unfortunate 5 mile climb out of the park and got back on our road. We reached the peak and started our way down. We had almost 12 miles of downhill riding before the next uphill section.
We easily flew down the hills and watched the countryside fly by. We saw canyons wind their way through the landscape on either side of us. Eventually we reached the steepest part of the descent. It went from the top of one side of a canyon to the bottom and then started the uphill to the other rim of the canyon. The other side was a steep rock face about 500 ft tall. The road edged up the side and went through a narrow gap that had rock walls towering on either side of it. The sun beat down on the long uphill stretch that was also about as steep as anything we had been on all day. It was challenging but the view from the climb was stunning.
Apparently the early settlers had to travel hundreds of miles to get around this huge wall we were climbing. Some informational signs did boast about how they build roads for their wagons almost straight down the canyon walls. This surely felt like one of those roads.
After the one big climb we had about 20 miles to go to the town of Blanding, Utah. These 20 miles were very tough because they were at the end of the day and forced us to go down and back up steep canyon roads repeatedly. We had to do lots of climbing at the end of what was already a long day. It doesn’t make climbing any easier. After what felt like too many climbs, we eventually peaked out on one climb and the landscape turned into rolling fields. The canyons were done. We grouped up and made a plan. The guy we had met that morning had mentioned a burrito place in Blanding and we had had our minds set on that all day. Finally having service for the first time in 2 days, we looked and saw that it was set to close at about the time we would get there. We called ahead and ordered and then raced to the store to beat their closing time. After reaching the store, we discovered that the time on Google was wrong and we had a whole extra hour. We ate our burritos, in that moment the best we had ever had. With still hungry stomachs, we looked for more food. We found an A&W restaurant that was still open and went for ice cream. We walked in and found the Brazilian couple from the night before ordering food right in front of us. It was a crazy coincidence that they had walked into the same restaurant at the same time. They were showered and clean but said they had arrived to the town with no water left and barely made it. We felt miserable enough when we got in and we didn’t have to worry about water. We couldn’t imagine how tough that would have been. We chatted for a while drinking our supersized milkshakes. They told us of their planned adventures and those that they had already done. They spent about 3 months of each year traveling. This year they were crossing the US and next year they were planning to do parts of Asia. They offered to host us in Brasilia if we came to visit. We unfortunately couldn’t commit to anything but got their email.
We camped at an RV park where we were able to get showers and clean bathrooms. The next day we would cross the border into Colorado!