The Logan River cuts through the mountain ridge just west of Bear Lake across to Logan UT.  US 89 shares the rocky canyon with the roaring waters on the way through Cache National Forest. It is a pretty drive especially toward the rugged cliffy end near Logan.  I am surprised at the number of private homes tucked along the route.  It seems like Utah has pretty loose property laws when it comes to private use of public lands?  We spend a few exploring Logan then it’s on back home.  We manage to rack up 200 miles today without really going anywhere.

We close out the day with a stop at Papa’s Chocolates and Ice Cream in Montpelier.  The chocolates all sound wonderful but my craving is for ice cream.  They serve Aggie ice cream.  Locally made at the University of Utah in Logan and they just got in a shipment.  There are lots of flavors.  I go for raspberries and cream in a store made waffle cone.  Kent goes for the waffle cone too.  His is filled with a chocolatey version with caramel chunks, Moose Buns I think it’s called.  The cones are super crunchy and ice cream wonderfully creamy.  Delicious.

Jack’s pizza

We passed through Logan at lunch time and stopped at Jack’s wood-fired Oven Pizza.  The pizza is pretty traditional thin crust but with house-made Italian sausage and pickled jalapenos.  We splurge on appetizers, a pesto artichoke stuffed portabella with asiago and balsamic drizzle and “lyon bread”, their take on cheese garlic bread.  Both are delicious, and our doggie bag provides plenty of leftovers for dinner.

An early one today.  We are up at 5:30 heading to Bear Lake NWR to see who is hanging out in this huge bullrush marsh.  We take the auto loop, there are mosquitos here too.  We spot the usual wetland suspects, redwing blackbirds, the slightly less frequent yellow headed blackbird, coots, mallards and a couple osprey.  It is a breeding area for coots and ibis as well as for Canada geese and mallards.  There are plenty of mommies with their broods trailing behind.  Nothing spectacular but a nice morning.

We swing through Paris, ID and check out the 1889 LDS Tabernacle and a number of historic buildings along Main Street.   One of the buildings houses Donut El Camino.  We just have to stop.  Tin ceiling, a beautiful old hardwood floor, and at least three woodburning stoves (none are needed today) make for a wonderfully laid-back place to hang out.  The donuts and coffee make it well worth the stop.   It appears the proprietors live in an open upstairs loft.

Then comes the history part, The Oregon/California Trail Center in Montpelier.  The main floor is devoted to the story of those who traveled through Idaho on this trail.  The count was around 450000 persons between 1840s and 1870s, 10% didn’t make it.  In a small-scale indoor re-enactment, a wagon driver and two young women travelers tell the story of hardship and perseverance.  Well done.

Upstairs we find the work of local artisans on display and for sale.  There is a large quilt show going on as well.  What a wonderful space to showcase their work.

The lower floor is a classic small-town museum like those we have seen all across the country.  It is filled with stuff people kept and donated or loaned to represent their home town, Montpelier (Oregon Trail stop Clover Creek). As always, it’s fun to check it out.

We are heading out and a fellow steps out of the back kitchen to say, “let me show you something.”  He leads us into this cool event space.  Booths are set up as covered wagons and set in a circle.  Each wagon has a screen where they project photos telling the story of the trail journey.  They routinely entertain tour buses but also host local events of all sorts.  It looks like it could be a fun space.  He is obviously very proud of it.

Today, an Idaho traffic jam.  A herd of sheep is lounging in the shade along the gravel forest route not far from camp.   Fortunately; they and their trusty herd dog (a somewhat scruffy looking Great Pyrenees) are very interested in shade.  They are mostly roadside and we are able to get by without much difficulty while only slightly disturbing the dog.  Parked mostly out of sight, we spot a home-made trailer/shack on wheels that we saw much further out in the forest yesterday.  We surmise they are all coming down for shearing or counting or heaven forbid, culling.  There are lots of lambs.

A neighbor in camp suggests we take the scenic route up through Caribou National Forest to Soda Springs to check out their geyser.  The road is gravel and graded dirt but not bad and the route is through rolling meadows mixed with thick stands of pine. It is ranch country.  Cattle are the main “wildlife” but we do see a golden eagle, a bald eagle, and the most unusual for us, a badger.  I guess they are pretty common but it is a rare sighting for us.

We get into to town just in time to see the geyser.  It erupts on the hour every hour for six minutes.  How can they be so precise?  It is actually an artesian spring that they have capped and put a solenoid valve on….tada, very predictable.  It has been a tourist attraction since in 1937 a couple of fellows looking to tap a spring for a swimming pool hit a gas pocket and blew out the spring.  It flooded the town a couple days then all agreed it had to be plugged.  Not long after, the “captive” geyser attraction was born.  It is cool.

There is another spring in town, Hooper Spring. It is naturally flowing mineral water that emerges into a protective stone spring house providing all who wish the opportunity to sample its healing waters.  We do.  It tastes salty but not bad.  The local thing seems to be to bring a water bottle and powdered flavoring and make your own soda.   Must be ok, lots of kids are sipping it.

Soda Springs was also a site for the Ground Observer Corp in the 1950s.  We checked out a reproduction of the little kiosk volunteers manned to watch the skies to alert of any foreign incursion into US airspace.  There is report of one false alarm that got a domestic flight grounded but no evidence of any actual threat to national security.  Still, it is an obviously proud civic memory.

Lunch at A&W then we take the shorter, highway route back home.

Darn, another equipment problem.  We are maybe two miles from camp and the low-pressure indicator comes on.  Just annoying at first but we watch the pressure drop like a rock.  Within a couple minutes it reads 0.  Gotta stop, right here along the gravel road.  We have to get the user’s manual out to figure out the jack and the spare tire hanger but all is done in 10 minutes and we are safely home.  There is a big jagged hole right in the middle of the tread.  Looks like a new tire in our near future.

Ok, back up into the mountains.  We are heading for Summit View campground in Caribou Targhee National Forest above Soda Springs ID.   Highs in the mid-80s and nights in the 50s, Ahhhh.  In Jensen and Vernal we pass all manner of dinosaur statue and sculpture.  Whimsical to true-to-life-fierce they stand watch at business, playgrounds, and city halls.  Beyond town, the route from the National Monument passes through more of the dinosaur valley with signs along the way reminding us what layer of rock we are passing through and who/what lived there at the time it was deposited.  Then we wind along Flaming Gorge, rugged with pines standing in contrast to the redrock.  Things level out and we glide though wide rolling valleys with grasslands as far as we can see either way.  We experience a Wyoming traffic jam.  Four cowboys on horseback moving a herd of cattle across the road….they didn’t all want to go that way!   We turn west on I80 and things get less scenic.  We are crossing broad alkali flats dotted with mines and wells and crisscrossed by railroad tracks and gravel roads carrying a steady flow of huge dump trucks.  There are signs warning of road closures while traffic waits for quarry dynamite explosions.  It seems like even this barren arid land deserves better treatment than this.  Probably not going to happen though, these minerals and compounds are used in a lot of stuff we consider essential.  Turning west and north into Idaho we first find lush irrigated farmland including brilliant yellow fields of flowering canola plants.  Soon we are in pine covered mountains and find our way to camp.  It is pretty remote with the nearest town with any sort of services over 25 miles away.  No cell service at all in camp.  It is cool and beautiful here.  Tomorrow, we head out to explore.

We had our first hick-up towing the pick-up.   The battery was dead when we unhooked.  No big problem, we just jumped it with the motorhome.  Still, it was odd.  We found no obvious reason for the problem.

Today we head for Dinosaur National Monument, the Utah side, home of the Quarry Exhibit Hall.  We pass through miles of sage brush plain and make a steep switchback climb up a lush green valley then across Douglas Pass.  This north west corner of Colorado and even more so the neighboring Utah is cool terrain.  Enormous geologic uplift has tilted and deformed layer upon layer of sedimentary rock exposing bands of color cut through by ridges of sandstone.  Maybe not exactly beautiful but certainly amazing.

This end of the monument is all about dino bones.  Some 149 million years ago, a raging river carried and buried bones of at least 10 species of dinosaurs in this one valley.   It is the site of a huge dig that began in 1908.  Like at most digs, lots of bones have been removed and sent to various museums.  The cool thing here, the on-site exhibit is a section of the dig.  A vertical wall of earth with 1500 dinosaur bones all excavated to expose them but left in place, exactly as they were deposited millions of years ago.  One section of the wall still contains a nearly complete skeleton of a Camarasaurus, one of those long necked, long tailed planteaters. It is cool to try to spot all the pieces like a giant puzzle.  Plus, we get to touch actual dino bones.  Very cool.  Check it out.

We make a quick stop to check out pictographs and petroglyphs but save exploration of the rest of the monument for another, cooler time.  There is lots more to see besides dino bones.

We are spending the night in Green River campground here on the Monument.  Most of the sites are among majestic cottonwoods along the river bank. Late in the day clouds are building.  We can see sheets of rain reaching for the ground on nearby mountains along with flashes of lightning.  Occasionally a light sprinkle makes it to the ground here.  It is amazing to watch.  It reminds me of watching storms develop and approach in Nebraska when I was a kid. I still love it.  Just about dark a mule deer browses its way past our site between us and the river.  This is a dark sky park but it’s a bright half-moon and a there are still a few scattered clouds.  It is a beautiful night but too much light to find the Milky Way.  Another time.

Thankfully its only figurative pain but still…what a pain.  Kent pulled the crown off of a molar with the sticky chewy center of a tootsie pop.  The tooth already has a root canal so no physical pain but he is on the hunt for a dentist who can get him in and take care of it before he breaks the tooth or something.  Just two calls in and he is set with Ruby Canyon Dental in Grand Junction.  It’s a nice office with friendly staff and they soon find that yes, the tooth is still sound and they can do a same day crown replacement for just $1500.  We are wrapping our heads around the dollar amount while musing over the xrays they have up when we learn exactly how crowns are done.  Shazam, that little piece Kent saved the other day isn’t a broken piece, it’s the whole thing AND if it is not damaged, they can just glue it back in place. For about $250.  Well, we didn’t throw it away but its back at the motorhome an hour away.  There is a flurry of discussion among dentist and staff ending with the decision to reconvene tomorrow with the loose crown and make the call, new cap or reglue.  The short story, $275 and Kent is good to go.  The old crown is back in place.

Billed as ‘The largest’ or ‘One of the largest’ flat top mountains in the world, it is high at 10,000+ feet and it is huge.  It is also tree covered and dotted with hundreds of lakes, quite different from the vast high desert and the sage brush ranges flanking it on three of its sides far below.  We approach from the south up Colorado 65 on a steep climb of 6000 feet above the plains with our first stop the visitor center in Cedaredge then on to camp at Vega State Park. Kent is glad to just be pulling the little truck rather than the big trailer.  Once we reach the top, I am on wildlife watch.  They reintroduced moose here about 25 years ago and the herd now numbers in the 400s.  They also claim mule deer, elk, black bear and marmots.  It is wildflower season too so always something for me to watch for while Kent watches the road.  The route zig-zags between lakes in the center of the mesa.  It is a beautiful ride with amazing views.  Stops to explore further will wait until we safely settle the motorhome and are back out and about in the truck.

Now I’m a bit bummed.  We, more specifically I, completely misjudged the location of our camp.  Vega is all the way back down off the north side of the mesa and another 20 miles across the hot arid landscape. It is in the mid 90s when we get here.   Its just not what I’ve been imagining.  I thought I’d wake up early the next few mornings in the cool wilderness camp and just step out to watch for wildlife and relax in the evenings in that same setting.  Instead, it’ll be a long arduous drive we will make maybe once or twice.  Like I said, not what I have been envisioning.  On the bright side, our site is on the sunflower blanketed shore of a lovely little lake and we see deer, a falcon, and osprey plus a number of other familiar birds.