We asked that our mail be delivered to Provo, UT and had planned to stay at the Elks Lodge in Provo. We called the Lodge and found out they were having a convention. Did some scrambling and found a city campground in Spanish For, UT. Barebones, asphalt parking lot type campground but it would work out fine.

We were surprised about the Salt Lake City area. There are mountains all around and the area is quite beautiful.

The View from our Campground

A Very Nasty Thunderstorm

We were a bit lonely for a day or 2

We have been waiting for our mail and having nasty, windy, rainy weather. The mail was scheduled to be in on Saturday but didn't show up. Finally arrived on Monday. In the meantime, we did things around the MH, just like a house. Sunday is our usual laundry day and this became a challenge. Several laundromats were closed on Sunday. This caught us by surprise.

Provo Area

Since we were delayed in Utah a few days we decided to change our plans and go to Yellowstone for a few days and then head into Canada. This is a good time to visit Yellowstone, not all the roads are open and there are a lot of animals wandering around. Going to be cold but that is OK for us. After our visit to Yellowstone, we will head directly to Canada. We still have a lot of miles to cover.

Besides working around the MH and doing our "to do" items I have been working on the details of our trip to Alaska. There is a book, called Mileposts, that documents, in excruciating detail(uses 10ths of miles) the main(mostly all) the roads leading to Alaska and in Alaska. Every turnout, side road, etc. are documented. Took me a while to come up with a system using different color highlighters to mark what we should be interested in. We are hoping to cover 100-150 miles a day when driving the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek but that may be optimistic. There will be weather delays, construction delays and numerous random stops.

Today our plans were to visit the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, a 3700 no-kill facility plus an additional 17000 acres rented from the BLM. We were amazed as to how popular the sanctuary was and how well kept, obviously well funded. The sanctuary pretty much accepts all companion animals(pets) and their motto is "Save them all: We were planning to take a tour(2 hours long) but all tours were fully booked. For the middle of the week in April, this was quite surprising as Kanab is not exactly close to anything big. We will put the Best Friends and the PipeSpring NM back onto our bucket list.

About Best Friends:

Best Friends was founded in 1984 and provides for about 1700 animals on a daily basis. This is a well maintained, immaculate facility. It is the largest animal sanctuary in the US and a world-leader in the no-kill movement for the last 30 years.

You could easily spend an entire day at the Sanctuary. From taking the tour, doing a few hikes, lunch(buffet $5) and just enjoying the views.

I was curious about the history of Best Friends but could find little information on who created the sanctuary and how Kanab was selected.

The Sanctuary also has 2 pet cemetaries, one for their animals and one for the public. Both are well maintained and we spoke to a few of the volunteers.

If you are in the area, do some planning and schedule a tour and visit.

View from the Visitor Center

Memorial for Pets

Many wind chimes, all in the Key of D, wonderful!!

Rock formations that look like pudding

The views are phenomenal

After Best Friends, we drove to Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. This sounded interesting but we discovered that it was primarily an ATV type park, not even a visitor center. We gave the park a pass.

The Dunes(better ones in park) aren't even coral!!

Curious things found on the road:


From Page to Kanab the person who put tar in the cracks must have been a frustrated artist. On the road for miles, drawn with the tar were "pictures". States, birds, animals, buildings, etc.

The restaurant by Pipe Spring is good. Don't order a full order of fries, a 1 qt. container overflowing is considered a full order.

Driving from Kanab to Joseph, UT(where we are now) we passed Caboose Village. 7 cabooses that have been made into rooms to rent for the night!

We are in the town of Joseph, there are no restaurants, not even fast food!! Tomorrow we will be in the Salt Lake City area, waiting for mail.

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We have spent 2 days in the Kanab area and enjoyed ourselves. We will be back to do a few tours. 

Our first day we pulled into the campground and in the afternoon went to the Pipe Spring National Monument. 

Pipe Spring National Monument

We saw this National Monument on a map and decided to visit. Never heard of it before. A very nice monument that enlightened us with the conflict between the Paiute, Mormons and the govt. As usual, the Paiute lost. Not a proud moment in US history.

This spring is created from the Vermillion Cliffs from the snow melt and some of the water appears at this location. I believe it flows all year which makes this spring a critical water source.

The Paiutes appeared in the area around 1000 AD and, as with all Native Americans, appreciated nature and respected nature. The Mormons appeared on the scene following Brigham Young’s call for his flock to expand into Arizona. Due to the water source, Mormon ranchers began settling in the area. Grazing cattle did not co-exist well with the Paiute, gatherers. The Paiute and Navajo started raiding the Mormon ranches and killing off the stock. A fortified ranch house was built, looks more like a small fort. The Paiutes, over time, lost more and more of their land but they stayed in the area. Finally, the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation was established and the Pipe Spring Ranch was purchased and the National Monument created.

We found the monument well worth a visit. Our only disappointment was we missed the last tour of the day and didn’t have time the next day. 

An Original Wagon

A Retention Pond, clear water

The spring was directd through the original house, then to the retention pond

 

Beginning Our 2019 Travels, Alaska here we come

Another winter has passed and it is getting time to hit the road. We are heading to Alaska this year. This has been on our bucket list for quite some time and this is the year. Over the winter Tom has encountered several medical issues but they are now resolved and we are ready to hit the road. We will be leaving right after Easter and head north. We were delayed a month so our initial plans have changed and we will not be able to stop and smell the roses too much on the way north. We have a lot of miles to cover to get to Alaska by early June.

As I learn more about the blogging software that I use new things will appear. I hope to have more pictures this year. I have learned(still learning) how to connect a Google Photos Album to the blog. I will still post pictures in the blog but will also have the album available as a tab on top for those of you who want to see additional pictures. Sounds good, hope all goes a planned.

For now, I am getting the blog ready with the 2019 map and other minor housekeeping items.

Our first day out went very smooth. We had anticipated a lot of traffic, especially trucks, heading North on I17. Since this is a climb from 1700 feet to 7000 feet we spend a lot of time in the right lane and had planned on being held up by the trucks who were struggling up the grades as we were. Amazingly, there were few trucks and we were able to maintain good speed in our climb up to Flagstaff.

Since we arrived at Flagstaff in a timely manner and the weather as good(showers had been forecast) we decided to continue on toward Page. We managed to get to Page and decided to stop overnight at Lone Rock, a National Park Campground. We did this for 2 reasons: we wanted to test our generator autostart function(there is no electricity in the campground) and we didn't want to unhitch the car(lazy). Everything worked out. We had a so-so sunset. I had hoped for better.

The Seven Peaks around Flagstaff

Our View at Lone Rock, Page

How we plan a trip

Several of you have wondered how we plan our trips. I need to say I enjoy the planning but as soon as we get on the road I wonder why we even try to plan. People tell us about places to visit, roads are closed, weather changes our plans etc. I still plan.

The first step is to determine where we want to go. OK, this year Alaska. Next is when we are going to leave and when do we want to be in Alaska.

Next, we think about a general route. For Alaska, we felt we had 3 routes: West coast, straight up through Utah and Idaho or a little east through Wyoming and Montana. Initially, we were going through Wyoming and Montana. Since we were delayed a month those plans changed. Utah and Idaho it is. As a change of pace, we will go up the west side of the Rockies vs. the more traditional Icefields Hwy and through Banff and Jasper.

I have collected thousands of articles over the years and have put them in Evernote(a database program). I am able to ask Evernote to give me all articles on Utah(as an example). I then lightly scan each article to see if there is anything of interest. If there is I make note of the town and interesting point on a spreadsheet.

Next step is to clean up the spreadsheet(lots of duplicates). I then sort by town and start marking a paper map where each town is that we might be interested in and each scenic drive.

Once everything is marked up I have a good idea where we might base camp so we can see an area. We will generally spend 4-6 days in one location and go in a different direction each day. We always need to plan a day for food shopping and laundry at least once a week.

We leave on Monday, Apr 22nd so the trip is generally beginning to gel. We will pretty much drive straight through Utah, with a few rest stops etc. We will then spend a lot of time in Idaho and BC before reaching Dawson Creek, the traditional starting point of a trip to Alaska. Mile "0" of th Al-Can Highway.

We would like to leave Dawson Creek in late May, no later than June 1.

Sounds good in theory, we will see what happens and just handle the bumps in the road as we go along. 

On Friday we migrated to Spanish Fork, just south of the Provo area. We had planned to stay in the Elks lodge for while waiting for our mail. When we called, there was a convention going on and no space was available. We were a little concerned since a weekend was coming up. We did some scrambling and found a city park in Spanish Fork. Surprisingly it was virtually empty for the weekend. Not the greatest of campgrounds but a place to park with water and electric. The campground is on the edge of the city park which is quite nice.

We drove to the post office and our mail wasn't in yet. Thought about taking a scenic drive but decided not to. Best decision we made. About two hours later a nasty storm hit with hail the rest of the day was cloudy and showers on and off.  We were very happy being snug in our MH.

We were very surprised by how beautiful the area is. The towns are in the valleys and snow-covered peaks surround the area. We will do some more exploring tomorrow after we stop at the post office again.

The View from Our Campsite

Driving to the Post Office

Another Campground View

On Saturday, with no mail yet, we took off on a scenic drive. We took Hwy 189 East to Heber City, we saw on the map that there was a Heber City RR so we made sure we drove by. 5-6 trains run on Saturday to different locations, all were sold out and the parking lot was full, full, full. Trains run 4 days a week, not on Sunday. We will need to make a reservation next time here.

The drive we took on Hwy 189 was very scenic but all the hills(mountains?) were barren, no rees whatsoever. We weren't high enough up to be above the tree line and it didn't look like all the land had been cleared, just an oddity.
 
On the way back we decided to take the Alpine Loop Road and go to Timpanogos Cave National Monument. We drove about 8 miles up, and I mean up, this twisty road with many switchbacks. Turned a corner and found 6' of snow. Uh-oh. Road closed still. We turned around and down the road, we went. Back to the MH by 2. Oh well. See what tomorrow brings. Nice scenic drive though, no pictures. 

On Sunday we went off to do laundry and the Nebo Loop Scenic Drive. We don't have much hope that this one will be open all the way. It wasn't.