|
Thursday, 6/10/21: Perfect Plan?
My “beat the heat” plan was perfect. We would move up to the Weber County Memorial Campground at the Causey Reservoir. This was located in a gorgeous alpine mountain area about 20 miles east of Ogden. We would secure two campsites and Chandler and Cora would join us for the weekend.
There are two reservoirs in the area - the peaceful and beautiful Causey and the larger Pineview. I had read that Causey was a haven for swimming and paddle boarding. Motors weren’t allowed on the lake, but our kayaks can, if we have to, utilize paddles. Pineview, however, is wide open for all motors.
There are several small National Forest Campgrounds on the road to Weber County Park, but they are all booked up solid for the next two weeks. All my eggs were in the Weber basket. The reviews that I read indicated that Weber was a hidden gem. Unlike the National Forest Campgrounds, it was first-come first serve. I felt confident that arriving early on Thursday morning would do the trick.
As we drove into the campground we found all sorts of terrific sites along a burbling creek. We claimed a nice flat spot with an open site next door for Chandler and Cora. This was looking pretty darn good and I was feeling pretty darn smug.
Suddenly, a panicked skinny young guy ran up to us and gave us the news. He was the director of some organization he called the Electric Pow-Wow. They had rented the whole park for a weekend music festival. For $400 we could buy weekend tickets for wall-to-wall bands, allowing us to camp in a field with a godzillion other campers.
So, what were the odds of picking the only weekend the park would be closed down? OK, doing the math gets me to 1 in 52.
After about 30 seconds of extreme dumbfounded - you’ve got to be kidding me - frustration, we decided to just move onto our next scheduled location, which was the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in northeastern Utah, and three hours away.
Only two campgrounds on the Reservoir had first-come first serve campsites. One was Canyon Rim. It had the best location for our style of base camping. The problem was, it only had two sites that allowed first-come first-serve. The rest of the sites were reservation only, and you have to make reservations at least five days in advance. The other campground was Antelope Flat, which was a little out-of-way for taking off and exploring. It had a dozen out of 60 sites that were first-come first-serve.
So, in the whole Flaming Gorge area there are about 500 campsites spread out among dozens of campgrounds and I could only identify less than 20 sites set aside for first-come first-serve. To me, that is crazy. It should be more of a 50-50 balance.
The Flaming Gorge Reservoir is 90 miles long, nestled in a beautiful green alpine canyon within the Uinta Mountains. As we drove along the reservoir towards Canyon Rim Campground, we were taken aback by how delightful it would be to camp in an area without dust. As amazing as Utah’s landscape is, it does have a lot of dust. I will be cleaning dust out of V-Jer and Saturn’s cracks and crevices for months, not to mention my own cracks and crevices.
As it turned out, one of the two first-come first-serve sites in Canyon Rim was open. It was perfect. Canyon Rim provides each campsite literally acres of space. The site was level. The site was green with grass. The site had a clean un-stinky toilet nearby. The site had plenty of sun for solar. The site was located at 7200’ and is 10º to 15º cooler than Salt Lake City.
It was 3:30 pm by the time we were set up in our new homestead. We just relaxed the rest of the afternoon. All I accomplished the rest of the day was to the nail down two tickets for the “Wall of Bones” display for tomorrow at 1 pm at Dinosaur National Monument, 45 miles away.
Tomorrow promises to be a busy and action-packed day.
| 
