We then headed back North to the road out to the Needles area of the Canyonlands National Park. We stopped at the Newspaper Rock on the way in. It' an Indian petroglyph site.
The drive out to the Needles Area of Canyonlands NP has some nice views.
We did a quick tour of the Visitor Center and the viewpoints including a short hike out to an Indian ruin. We enjoyed our lunch looking out over the needle rocks.
It was getting late (2pm) when we finally started our Jeep Trek out the Lockhart Basin Road. It's a 4x4 road that goes up to Moab down below the bluffs where we were looking out over the canyonlands yesterday. We had seen portions of the road and it didn't look too bad so we decided to try it. It's about 54 miles up to Moab. When I ask at the Visitor Center they said it was rather an extreme road. About three miles in, just past the second BLM campground, the road went up a hill along a ledge and around a corner. We came upon a manual cattle guard (gate). Most of the cattle guards are automatic cattle guards (those grills across the road) and don't require any action like a gate does. There was no sign at the gate but we had seen an "End Public Lands" sign shortly before. So, even though the road was barely as wide as the Jeep, I turned around and returned a ways back on the road. Another vehicle was then headed up to where we had been so I turned around and waited to see if he came back down the hill. He didn't so we went back up and saw him cruising further up the road. We opened the gate and proceeded on up the road ourselves. Some people have more initiative than I do I guess.
We made our way up about 20 miles then took a side road out to a Colorado River viewpoint. Our road was in BLM lands until we were almost at the end of the road where we came upon a manual cattle guard (gate). Beyond the gate was the Canyonlands National Park. When we got to the end of the road we couldn't see the river so we took a little walk and found the river was just a couple of hundred feet away from us. We had come clear down to river level and had a really nice view. Going that last 200 feet would have involved getting trough some riverside brush and trees so we enjoyed from our viewpoint.
That side road was in heavy sand much of the way but was only 6 miles out.
We returned to the main road and continued our trek toward Moab. We only went another two miles before the road got really severe. We had two extreme rock crawling spots then the road headed up the side of the bluff on a ledge not much wider than the Jeep.
We crawled on out another four or five miles until we met some campers in a Jeep Rubicon, a real rock crawling vehicle. We asked if they had come down from Moab and they had so we asked out the road ahead. They said the next 15 miles were at least as bad as our past five miles and that at one spot they barely made it through. They said the 15 miles had taken them about 5 hours. We were still a total of 35 miles from Moab with only three hours of daylight left.
We considered going on a bit further but only got to the rise above their camp and could see the road for the next five miles or so as it clung to the side of the bluff. It was already 5:15pm so we decided to return back the road we came out. We got back to the paved road about 7pm. Nice trip. We may come down the opposite direction on the road from Moab and see how far we can go in a few days when we have moved up there. We will probably start earlier in the day as well. The views down there are much different from those at the top.
Other than the pickup we saw at the beginning that stopped to camp a short ways after the gate and the campers in the Jeep we met where we turned around, there were no other vehicles on the road. Kind of lonely.
There aren't too many flowers out but these two were looking pretty good.
Our lunch was ham and cheese sandwiches as usual. Lou made super chorizo nachos for dinner again. It was mostly prepared last night and allowed for a quick dinner when we got home about 7:30pm. Tomorrow we're going to be sure we have a campsite in Moab before we leave our campsite here at Windwhistle. It's too close to the weekend and campgrounds may be full this late in the week. If they are we'll spend the weekend here.
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