Day 800. July 14, 2021. Saratoga Springs Utah
Movin again... and it feels good. It feels familiar. That sense of wonder… exhilaration even... that comes over me when the road opens up in front of us... with few signs of civilization. If ya strip out the power lines ticking by alongside us... and those reflective centerlines rolling up underneath... and then out behind us.... any other traces of civilization are rare. And that’s when it’s the best...
If your headed west... out of Rangely... your options are few... if your relegated to asphalt, which sadly... we are.... Which explains why we’d become so familiar with Dinosaur Colorado... And Vernal Utah. This would mark our 5th pass through the area in just the last two years... including the familiar stop at the Walmart in Vernal to gas up... and stock up on supplies.
But this time... Vernal... is where the familiarity would end. We’d gone north from here... we’d gone west from here... so this time... we’d head southwest... and into a landscape we hadn’t seen before.
Over the next couple hundred miles... the scenery would shift. We’d put those rugged, wide open Mountains of Colorado’s high desert... and oil fields in the rearview... and back into Utah’s Uinta Mountains... initially things felt the same. But then... a shift.
We began a slow climb into Provo Canyon... and around nearly every bend... mother nature continues the shape shifting. The peaks of the mountains got sharper.... higher.... before we knew it the browns... and reds of the Uinta basin had transformed into sudden bursts of green.
As the road began to narrow... squeezed in between mountains that felt straight out of the Pacific Northwest... The air cools just enough to notice. Trees start showing up where they weren’t invited before. Cottonwoods first. Then evergreens. The kind of green you don’t see in desert places... as if the land was coming back to life....
Suddenly there’s water everywhere.
The Provo River runs alongside the road, cutting its way down out of the Wasatch Mountains. You can hear it before you really see it, rushing and tumbling, a constant reminder that this place is shaped by flow, not force. Snowmelt turned into movement.
Then...as if mother nature needed to put a big ‘ol exclamation point on it all...we’d come upon Bridal Veil Falls.
Water spilling straight off limestone cliffs, fed by the Provo River system, breaking into mist before it ever reaches the canyon floor. It’s not subtle. It doesn’t hide. It just announces itself. After hundreds of miles of dry ground and muted color, that burst of white water and deep green feels almost unreal. As if the landscape just decided to...show off a bit.
That canyon feels like a threshold. On one side, the wide, hard worked basin. On the other, a world shaped by water and elevation.
As you come out of the canyon and into Utah Valley, the river widens, slows, and eventually feeds into Utah Lake. The same water that came screaming down the canyon spreads out and settles. Utah Lake itself is broad and shallow, fed by the Provo River along with the Spanish Fork River and American Fork River. In July, it sits heavy and reflective under the sun, surrounded by farmland, development, and that constant Wasatch backdrop.
The contrast was striking...
Had to pull off for a closer look... and some lunch...
We pulled off into a State Park along Utah Lake... looked like tons of RV parking available... Had a quick lunch in the parking lot... and was actually contemplating a night or two alongside the lake ... when I popped open one of those gig apps on my phone... and was surprised to learn of another Walmart Remodel underway just a few miles up the Road in a place called Saratoga Springs. Cool... I thought.... just like that one we worked a few months back in Spirit Lake Iowa... all the folks I had met from all over the country... the stuff I’d learn about how a store ... in sections... gets taken apart... rearranged a bit... and put back together...every night... so the store could open for business again the next morning.
So it was off to Saratoga Springs…
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