Day 16 - Escalante, UT.

We wandered across the street back to the same joint where we'd had dinner the night before. A couple pancakes and a gallon of coffee later, we were droning up the magnificently windy Rt. 12 on the way northeast to Boulder, UT and the possibility of the Burr Trail.

We had no firm plan, as usual, as to where we were going to go today, or what we'd see, but we had the notion to explore the Burr Trail and cross Lake Powell on the Bullfrog Ferry. Big Dog had been here before a few years ago, and was willing to ride it again. One of the reasons why is the geographical hurdle of the river. We crossed at Hite's on the first day of the ride, and really didn't want to go into Arizona or up to Moab to cross. The ferry seemed like a good option, although there's not a great deal of route options once commited.

We stopped in Calf Creek Gulch to set up Big Dog's helmet cam, so he could catch some video of our decent to Lake Powell.

We topped off on fuel one more time, knowing where we were headed that fuel can be scarce. Not many gas stations out here on the Burr Trail Road.....

The first miles of the trail have been recently paved, and it really was a shame. I'm sure that someone thought they were doing a good thing by paving it - and making it more accessible - but it really doesn't help much since the middle section of the trail is pretty much for higher clearance vehicles anyway. Soon enough, and right after Long Canyon, the asphalt gives way to a gravel road, and all is well once again.....

We were still at fairly high altitude, and I knew we'd begin dropping into the canyons and towards Lake Powell. What I didn't know was about 1,000 feet of it were as dramatic as it was - but I'll get to that soon enough.

Droning along, if that's even a possibility on the 950, I was constantly awed by the beauty of the canyonlands of Utah. The color of the sedimentary rock, the blue sky, the dramatic erosion carving....all makes for an exceptional view, and also makes it hard to ride and pay attention.

An arch, off in the distance....

And then, as we crossed into the Capitol Reef National Monument, we reached the switchbacks. I guess this is why they call it the Grand Staircase.....?

And we started on down...

We rode along Hall's Creek, wanting to explore all sorts of trails and 4wd roads, but we needed to get across the river, and we really didn't have gas to spare since we were heading south beyond the ferry.

As we neared the ferry, the road again turned to asphalt, and we turned up the speed somewhat to 'catch the ferry', even though we didn't have any idea what the schedule was....We got there with 20 minutes to spare, and ran into a tour group from Birmingham, AL. They were riding everything from Harleys to R1200GS Adventures, and were just spending a week cruising the southwest. Nice folks.

The ferry was $10, and a nice break in the morning's ride.

Coming into the slip on the south shore....

We were so ready to be back on the bikes after the 25 minute ferry ride, we fired up the 950's and took off, headed who knows where. We made a bit of a mistake and failed to top off on fuel while we could get it back at Bullfrog, and that would become a bit of a headache later on.

We motored out Rt. 276, Monument Valley far off on the horizon to the south.

We were heading to the intersection of 276 and 95. We'd been here before, two weeks and a day earlier. What we were hoping to do was ride south towards Mexican Hat, but we weren't sure we'd be able to get fuel there. It was Sunday. We really didn't want to ride out to Blanding, where we knew we'd find fuel. So we stopped at the intersection of 95 and 261, waited a little while, and asked a passing local fella about fuel. He said that the gas station in Mexican Hat was open - so we were in good shape!

We headed south on 261 - this was the road we intersected when we rode through Snow Flat Road....

Soon after, our fuel lights came on - not much gas left. Hopefully enough to make it into Mexican Hat. It'd be close, though. We were rewarded by finding the Moki Dugway.

The Moki Dugway was named so from an old indian name for a trail carved into the sides of Cedar Mesa. It was built in the late 50's at a cost of approximately $7 million as a shortcut. In the mid 60's a truck went over the side - and you can still see parts of the truck chassis in the lower right of the next photo. The driver lived....

My fuel light had been on for almost 30 miles. There should be about 10 more miles of fuel in there.....I decided to coast down to the bottom, motor off, and enjoy the view.

As we decended into the low desert from the mesa, the heat began to build.It was getting hot. Since we were almost out of fuel, we'd have to bypass that dirt road loop through the Valley of the Gods and get gas. Maybe we'll backtrack to it?

As we reached the valley floor, the heat hit us like a blast furnace. It had to be 110 degrees. And now I was also out of water.

We wondered why the town of Mexican Hat was called by that name. Strange, since it's right on the edge of the Hopi Indian Reservation. And then it became fairly obvious.

We explored briefly along the banks of the San Juan River, but the heat and fuel situation cut us short.

We rode into Mexican Hat and fueled up - we calculated that we'd gotten 49mpg on that last tank of fuel - good thing, too - as we'd have run out of fuel out there if we'd gotten the usual 40mpg. The oppressive heat drove us to seek shelter in air conditioning. We split a dreadful pizza and filled our camelbacks from the ice machine.

While we waited for the pizza, we weighed our options. We were heading back towards Montrose, but really with no date that we had to be there. We could go west to Monument Valley, but we'd end up on the north rim of the Grand Canyon if we made a loop of that. We considered backtracking to the Valley of the Gods, but it was just too damned hot right now. Another option was to head north up along the Comb Wash - but we'd ridden part of that already - *and* it was soooo damned hot. So we decided to head north towards Blanding and make a decision then weather to head into the Manti LaSalles.

When we reached blanding, the handwriting was on the wall. Although I wanted to just keep riding, we'd been gone from home for eighteen days already, and it was another two days to get back from here. Twenty days on the road. It'd been long enough - time to head home. We decided to make a run for the truck in Montrose. It was about 180+ miles from here, and although we'd already ridden 300+ miles today, we figured we could make it before dark. I downed a couple RedBulls and topped off my camelback too.

When we passed through Monticello, we jumped onto the TransAm Trail for a few miles to avoid as much pavement as possible, and crossed back into Colorado.

We hopped on Rt. 141 and headed north up to Rt. 145 at Naturita.

At Placerville, we took Rt. 62 towards Ridgeway - and past Last Dollar Gulch. I need to come back here someday soon - maybe on the 950 Super Enduro, to do some exploring of the stuff we were just whizzing past.

We raced back to Montrose from Ridgeway, unloaded our gear, and loaded up the bikes in the truck. We figured we'd covered 4,500 miles in sixteen days, in eight states. No mechanical failures, no crashes, no injuries.

I can hardly wait to do it again. Thanks for reading.

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