UCE3 - Utah Cruiser Expedition 3

[roverrocks]

yeah I'm not sure what you suggest we should have done. We did not have alternative routes we could have taken. We weren't "tearing" anything up. In truth the areas that were the most muddy were sections of road that were covered in flood plane flow, or were roads that had been severely washed out by flooding. Any damage done was already there as a result of flooding. Also the rains continued and I can guarantee that there was no sign we had even passed through those places after two days. If those roads which are all on BLM land have any kind of maintenance done to them to repair the flood damage, anything we might have "torn up" would be removed.

I'd be curious as to what you would have done in our situation? This type of trip requires months of planning. That planning couldn't not foresee the effects of the harsh weather that affected the tracks we had planned. Had the roads been dry, obviously there would have been no issue, but do you just abandon months of preparations because the weather changed? I can assure you we all did our utmost to adhere to Tread Lightly principles.

Sometimes you have to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. I personally have abandoned or changed plans to do outdoor things many many times in my life because of the weather be it hiking or 4x4ing or hunting. One can't always say "full speed ahead" and "into the breech" or do a "Charge of the Light Brigade" or "July 1916 Somme Death Charge". Plans CAN be changed and as army commanders have been saying forever "no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy" which in your case was deep muddy roads.. I WOULD have changed my plans rather than rear up some of the roads you did, absolutely. It's NOT whether you can do it or not but whether you should do it or not. At the very least don't publicly publish the photos where the rabid SUWA can view them and use them as nuclear evidence for land closures. If you don't like my views tough. Adaptability is the key to any adventure in the outdoors. I am tired of going out in springtime when things dry up and viewing roads and trails recently torn to deeply rutted shreds in Western Colorado and every spring they are numerous. You had a great adventure and saw many beautiful places but one MUST ADAPT AND CHANGE PLANS in light of road conditions, hiking trail conditions, or 4x4 trail conditions. As I said if you don't like my views tough. The times they are achanging and we all have to ADAPT or find ourselves out-of-luck due to land closures. Do I ever get into muddy conditions YES but do I ever turn back or go on an alternate route OFTEN VERY OFTEN. I have been out often on FROZEN muddy trails this winter and early spring but I stopped and returned to pavement or dry areas as the temperatures rose during the day. Am I perfect, heck no and I have done some damage myself even this year on what I thought was very thin/frozen mud and it was not. I turned around though and took another route and felt mortified at the 20 feet of trail damage I did. Other than the mud pictures I greatly enjoyed your adventure.

 

[Box Rocket]

Sometimes you have to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. I personally have abandoned or changed plans to do outdoor things many many times in my life because of the weather be it hiking or 4x4ing or hunting. One can't always say "full speed ahead" and "into the breech" or do a "Charge of the Light Brigade" or "July 1916 Somme Death Charge". Plans CAN be changed and as army commanders have been saying forever "no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy" which in your case was deep muddy roads.. I WOULD have changed my plans rather than rear up some of the roads you did, absolutely. It's NOT whether you can do it or not but whether you should do it or not. At the very least don't publicly publish the photos where the rabid SUWA can view them and use them as nuclear evidence for land closures. If you don't like my views tough. Adaptability is the key to any adventure in the outdoors. I am tired of going out in springtime when things dry up and viewing roads and trails recently torn to deeply rutted shreds in Western Colorado and every spring they are numerous. You had a great adventure and saw many beautiful places but one MUST ADAPT AND CHANGE PLANS in light of road conditions, hiking trail conditions, or 4x4 trail conditions. As I said if you don't like my views tough. The times they are achanging and we all have to ADAPT or find ourselves out-of-luck due to land closures. Do I ever get into muddy conditions YES but do I ever turn back or go on an alternate route OFTEN VERY OFTEN. I have been out often on FROZEN muddy trails this winter and early spring but I stopped and returned to pavement or dry areas as the temperatures rose during the day. Am I perfect, heck no and I have done some damage myself even this year on what I thought was very thin/frozen mud and it was not. I turned around though and took another route and felt mortified at the 20 feet of trail damage I did. Other than the mud pictures I greatly enjoyed your adventure.

I agree with you 100% in principle, however given our options we made the best decisions we could. It was nothing close to the idea of "we have our plan and we're sticking to it come hell or high water" as you might think. So while the principle is something I believe in, real world doesn't always allow what you describe.
As I mentioned before, I would challenge anyone to go see these routes that we travelled and find ANY sign that we were there. It's not gonna happen. And for the record, we DID change our plans. Our planned route changed several times during the trip because certain routes were deemed "impassable" because of the flooding. Our original final destination of the trip had us finishing at the Utah/Colorado border in the San Juan mountains. Obviously we didn't get there. So before passing judgement realize that changes were made to have as minimal impact as possible. This wasn't a Saturday trail ride where we encountered an obstacle and could take the proverbial "high-road" and abandon things. This was nearly 1000 miles offroad when things were all said and done. And if you do a simple bit of research regarding the weather this past September in Southern Utah you will see the extent of the flood damage. Even had we taken different routes, we would have encountered similar conditions. Just no way around it.

 

[dmc]

Sometimes you have to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. I personally have abandoned or changed plans to do outdoor things many many times in my life because of the weather be it hiking or 4x4ing or hunting. One can't always say "full speed ahead" and "into the breech" or do a "Charge of the Light Brigade" or "July 1916 Somme Death Charge". Plans CAN be changed and as army commanders have been saying forever "no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy" which in your case was deep muddy roads.. I WOULD have changed my plans rather than rear up some of the roads you did, absolutely. It's NOT whether you can do it or not but whether you should do it or not. At the very least don't publicly publish the photos where the rabid SUWA can view them and use them as nuclear evidence for land closures. If you don't like my views tough. Adaptability is the key to any adventure in the outdoors. I am tired of going out in springtime when things dry up and viewing roads and trails recently torn to deeply rutted shreds in Western Colorado and every spring they are numerous. You had a great adventure and saw many beautiful places but one MUST ADAPT AND CHANGE PLANS in light of road conditions, hiking trail conditions, or 4x4 trail conditions. As I said if you don't like my views tough. The times they are achanging and we all have to ADAPT or find ourselves out-of-luck due to land closures. Do I ever get into muddy conditions YES but do I ever turn back or go on an alternate route OFTEN VERY OFTEN. I have been out often on FROZEN muddy trails this winter and early spring but I stopped and returned to pavement or dry areas as the temperatures rose during the day. Am I perfect, heck no and I have done some damage myself even this year on what I thought was very thin/frozen mud and it was not. I turned around though and took another route and felt mortified at the 20 feet of trail damage I did. Other than the mud pictures I greatly enjoyed your adventure.

Two of the sections we tore up are constantly maintained by heavy machinery and will show no evidence whatsoever and the third is buried under 10 feet of snow and come end of spring will be smoothed by spring run off. There is a difference between tearing up small two tracks in the middle of nowhere, and getting stuck in mud on a major road. Regardless of having gone forward or turned around on the hills outside of Panquitch the road would have been torn up. The storm came in on us 10 miles in. At that point we could have stayed put overnight, which we considered, or push on and avoid doing even more damage after 12 more hours of rain. We did adapt and make changes to our route at least 3 times because of the conditions. Secondary roads were skipped and major roads were chosen for those very reasons. Everyone has their own ethics and yours seem to be more conservative than ours. I've been wandering the desert for over 20 years and have learned what is appropriate and ethical and what is destructive and permanent. I am a card carrying member of the Nature Conservancy after all and I have been through Tread Lightly courses more than once. Not once during UCE3 did I feel mortified for what we had done. The only time I would question is when we had to pull out the tourists but we didn't have the manpower to get them out by hand. Cross country travel in the desert if far more destructive than tearing up muddy sections of existing roads.

Great pics as always Adam. Thanks for posting your report.

 

[jeremyk]

So this is the proverbial "toughie". We all want to have these areas open to our adventures. We all want to be the best possible examples we can be. So that we are blameless when an area comes under scrutiny for closure. But, in the thick of it, we all get stuck or trapped when we push beyond what we know. Surprises come up, and we find ourselves in the process of "survival" (at least mentally) and the force to prevail is visceral. It is almost always impossible to discern if it will be better in front or behind, and humanly, we push on into the hope of the unknown, rather than turning back into what we already know is bad.

I've been there, and so has anyone else who has truly wandered.


"hope I don't get pulled over because they can't read my plate"

I got trapped by storms in the Henry Mountains, traveling solo on my way to the Expo last year and got really muddy and might have messed up some roads in the process - so I'm not about to cast any stones. It is always easier to do "the best thing" in retrospect, than it may be in actuality (all of our lives suffer from 20/20 hindsight). Sometimes you might alter your choices in reflection, but if you are truly going to adventure, your path may not always be clean. Do we let the fear of harm keep us from the attempt? Surely the forces put in place on the Earth are greater than that.

I have dealt with some of these people in the past and I believe that they were doing their best in the heat of the circumstances. Some of their livelihoods depend on these areas being kept open, there is no way they would willfully do harm - they aren't going to the Sunday mud-bogger to see how muddy they can get. It is healthy though that we challenge our methods.

These Earth-wounds will heal, we all (hopefully) do our best on the journey to keep them from happening unnecessarily. The roads will be graded in the spring and the rest won't be too far behind.

 

[Strizzo]

Two of the sections we tore up are constantly maintained by heavy machinery and will show no evidence whatsoever and the third is buried under 10 feet of snow and come end of spring will be smoothed by spring run off. There is a difference between tearing up small two tracks in the middle of nowhere, and getting stuck in mud on a major road. Regardless of having gone forward or turned around on the hills outside of Panquitch the road would have been torn up. The storm came in on us 10 miles in. At that point we could have stayed put overnight, which we considered, or push on and avoid doing even more damage after 12 more hours of rain. We did adapt and make changes to our route at least 3 times because of the conditions. Secondary roads were skipped and major roads were chosen for those very reasons. Everyone has their own ethics and yours seem to be more conservative than ours. I've been wandering the desert for over 20 years and have learned what is appropriate and ethical and what is destructive and permanent. I am a card carrying member of the Nature Conservancy after all and I have been through Tread Lightly courses more than once. Not once during UCE3 did I feel mortified for what we had done. The only time I would question is when we had to pull out the tourists but we didn't have the manpower to get them out by hand. Cross country travel in the desert if far more destructive than tearing up muddy sections of existing roads.

Great pics as always Adam. Thanks for posting your report.

This. the washouts and flooded roads will be re-graded as soon as its dry enough to get a grader in. These type of rains are not at all common so the BLM just goes out and fixes them after each flash flood. I've seen it on the road that crosses Floy wash and the road out to tusher canyon outside of Green river. After the grader had been through Tusher it was like a brand new road, unfortunately we beat them to Floy wash by a couple days and had to hike the rest of the way to our field stop about a mile or so down the road.

 

[mph]

Great thoughts and pictures...You captured the essence of Utah! Wild Utah!

FYI...Your comments about the Grand Staircase are a little off...Presidents have the right to create national monuments with Executive Order. Not National Parks. Those are acts of Congress...That's why Clinton probably "made it" a national moment with a signature rather than making it a congressional battle for National Park status...

Regardless..Sweet trip...Great narrative and pics!!!!

 

[dmc]

This. the washouts and flooded roads will be re-graded as soon as its dry enough to get a grader in. These type of rains are not at all common so the BLM just goes out and fixes them after each flash flood. I've seen it on the road that crosses Floy wash and the road out to tusher canyon outside of Green river. After the grader had been through Tusher it was like a brand new road, unfortunately we beat them to Floy wash by a couple days and had to hike the rest of the way to our field stop about a mile or so down the road.

The super muddy shots from West of Milford is a railroad access/livestock haul road. They actually have a grader parked at the East end of the road year round. I will say the weekend we did UCE the BLM was overwhelmed. UDOT actually brought snowplows down from Northern Utah to plow the paved roads of all the mud that had flooded the highways so you can imagine how bad the backcountry was. I had to think about Floy for a second as up until about 3 years ago it was called a Ranch Exit, or as I referred to 'the back road to Deadhorse Point.' That clay is some of the worst in Utah. You get off the road, or even on the road down there during a summer thunder storm and you might be there for a while. That places gets slick and gross very fast with very little rain.

 

[Big50]

Great write up and thanks for sharing your adventure!

 

[dmc]

FYI...Your comments about the Grand Staircase are a little off...Presidents have the right to create national monuments with Executive Order. Not National Parks. Those are acts of Congress...That's why Clinton probably "made it" a national moment with a signature rather than making it a congressional battle for National Park status...

Correct. Not a lot has changed since pre-Monument for the most part. Maybe some more signage and a few bathrooms but otherwise pretty much the same. The biggest difference down there has been finger pointing over who maintains roads. I think Left Hand Collett has been closed more than it's been open over the past 10 years due to flash floods and fighting over who is going to pay to fix it.

 

[richard310]

great report and the area looks amazing! Wish I can take a trip like that though.. I'll just be passing through next week...

 

[Box Rocket]

thanks for the clarification on the national monument stuff. I am most definitely not an expert on that one. I've edited the post to reflect "national monument" rather than national park. Just accept that I have a modest level of ignorance about it and cut me a little slack.

 

[pmatusov]

Adam, you may take into account Roverrocks' locale. People in Colorado are very sensitive to this, because idiots do it often in alpine tundra, and these wounds do take thousand years to heal.
Don't know if you guys remember the two brothers who took a wrong turn in Colorado about 10 or 15 years ago (in a Wrangler and a Dodge Ram), and it took them several days to get their vehicles off the mountainside.

 

[mph]

All good Plenty of slack...

thanks for the clarification on the national monument stuff. I am most definitely not an expert on that one. I've edited the post to reflect "national monument" rather than national park. Just accept that I have a modest level of ignorance about it and cut me a little slack.

 

[Box Rocket]

Adam, you may take into account Roverrocks' locale. People in Colorado are very sensitive to this, because idiots do it often in alpine tundra, and these wounds do take thousand years to heal.
Don't know if you guys remember the two brothers who took a wrong turn in Colorado about 10 or 15 years ago (in a Wrangler and a Dodge Ram), and it took them several days to get their vehicles off the mountainside.

Yeah I remember those two trucks.

 

[FELNTPSY]

Boulder Mt

Back on topic...(don't let a grump rain on the parade)

Man I love Boulder Mt.!!!!! Some Great Lakes on there....and the scenery is spectacular.
It has become an enjoyable place for me to go several times per year to fish. Heck, I leave my double cab in SLC now just to have it to go there!

Great report Adam!

Hope to meet up with you one of my trips out there. (Btw...Kurt should be hooking me up with a Helton install in the next few weeks!..thanks for the recommendation)

-Lee Smith