August 14-24, 2011 – Mt. Pleasant, UT

We left Delta on Sunday, August 14th and drove east to Mt. Pleasant, UT.  We are staying at Pleasant Creek Ranch, which is our home park in the Camper World network of campgrounds.  Mt. Pleasant is in the Sanpete Valley with the San Pitch Mountains to the West and the Wasatch Plateau to the East.  Our RV Park is located southeast of Mt. Pleasant at the base of the Wasatch Plateau.  We have a very nice site with grass and shade trees.

We are going to spend 11 days here relaxing and doing some Jeeping.


The first Jeep trip we took was on the Skyline Drive, an 87 mile 4-wheel drive road on the spine of the Wasatch Plateau.  We had been on this drive in June last year, but most of the southern part was closed because of snow.  We drove about 2/3rds of the road on this trip and it is a beautiful drive at altitudes between 9,000 and 11,000 ft.  This is looking down on the town of Mt. Pleasant.



We saw four shepherd’s camps along the road and passed a shepherd riding his horse on the road with his Border Collie running along beside.  But, we never did see any of the flocks of sheep.







There were wildflowers everywhere and they were beautiful.










We found this beautiful white Columbine peeking out from underneath a pine tree while we were taking a break and walking the dogs.







On our drive here last year we had to wait about an hour while a front-end loader dug out a huge snow drift on the road.   This year we only came upon one snowdrift blocking the road but were able to take a side trail around it.  There was still a lot of snow up here.




One section of the road was closed because of the danger of possible landslides so we had to detour down to Joes Valley where we had lunch by Joes Valley Reservoir.  We were able to get back onto Skyline Drive and continue our drive.  This is looking down one of the numerous side canyons to the Sanpete Valley.






It was getting late in the afternoon when we came to Manti Canyon so we headed down the canyon and stopped at Milky Falls.

We continued down Manti Canyon to the town of Manti and then took the highway back to Mt. Pleasant.  We had a great day and saw some wonderful scenery.



We took another Jeep trip into the San Pitch Mountains on the West side of the valley.  We drove up Maple Canyon, which is a popular rock climbing area.  We stopped towards the top of the canyon and took this picture looking back down; you can see how narrow the canyon is and how steep the walls are




We spent a very enjoyable day following 4-wheel drive roads in the San Pitch Mountains.  We saw another shepherd’s wagon but again did not see any sheep.

A friend from our RV Park in AZ, who lives in Monticello, UT, fell and broke her hip on Saturday.  She was transported to University Hospital in Salt Lake City where she underwent surgery on Sunday.  We drove to Salt Lake City on Tuesday to visit Mary Jane.  Although she was in a lot of pain she seemed to be doing fine.  We hope to see her back in Arizona this fall.

We enjoyed our time at Pleasant Creek Ranch.  It was nice to relax and not do much for a change.  We look forward to returning in the future to explore more of Skyline Drive and enjoy our home park.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

June 4-6, 2009

Image
June 4, 2009 We drove Northwest of Jasper along the Yellowhead Highway to Mount Robson Provincial Park. We saw a moose along the river in the distance but wasn’t close enough to get a picture. We saw Yellowhead Lake and Moose Lake, and had a picnic lunch at the Mt. Robson Visitors Center. The scenery is spectacular – a picture of Mt. Robson. Our site at Whistler campground. June 5 We left Jasper in the sunshine and warm but the further North we got, the colder, rainier and more grey it got. As we turned north on route 40 to Grand Paririe, we started to hit a little snow. Didn’t last long but really woke us up. It stayed rainy and grey until we got to Grand Cache then it started to clear. We also got our first real windshield chip today, but a trip to WalMart and a windshield repair kit later we were fixed. The land here is somewhat hilly, swampy and covered with trees. There are some really big oil and gas complexes and some large lumber mills such as the one we saw in Grand Paririe.
Read more

August 24-26, 2009

Image
We headed towards Flathead Lake Monday morning and stopped in Kalispell to get our air conditioner repaired. It had stopped working a couple of weeks ago and August is not the time to be without an air conditioner. The RV dealer we stopped at gave us the name of the guy who does their air conditioning work. He was able to fix the air conditioner (a switch had burned out) in a couple of hours and we were on our way. We drove to Polson, MT at the south end of Flathead Lake and are going to stay here for a few days. We are staying at Eagle Nest RV, which has a cherry orchard on one side, a golf course on one side and a horse pasture on another side. It is a really nice park with lots of grass and trees. Unfortunately, we are at the end of the cherry season and we might not be able to find any fresh cherries. Tuesday morning we decided to take a drive around Flathead Lake. This is a very scenic area with lots of fruit orchards. We found a fruit stand and bought cherries, peaches, tomatoes
Read more

July 28, 2009

Image
We left Valdez this morning in rain and fog and retraced our route back up the Richardson Highway. We ran out of the fog and rain after we went over Thompson Pass and thought we would be able to see more of the scenery. Not to be, shortly we ran into more smoke. We stopped at the visitor center at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park but it was really smoky so we didn’t stay very long. The ranger there (we think he was a ranger but he looked about 15 years old!) told us that there are currently 60 fires in Alaska and the smoke here is from the fires North of here around Fairbanks. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the largest national park in the US at 13.2 million acres. There are only 2 short gravel roads in the park so access is limited to backpacking, hiking and flight seeing. The park is mainly wilderness and has 4 major mountain ranges in it and includes 9 of the 16 highest peaks in the US. Unfortunately, because of the smoke we were not able to see any of them. We turned off the R
Read more