Fixed the Purge Valve and Checked out Campgrounds

Tuesday August 11, 2015       Day 14         Lodgepole Campground    3^rd Day

We’ve been on the road for two weeks now.  We’ve driven 2,920 miles of which 1,767 were towing the Oliver.  We’ve stayed at three state parks in three separate states, and three national forests in two different states.  We still have three national parks to visit.  We are as far west as we planned to go and will start heading north into western Wyoming in a couple of days.

We didn’t know how the day would go.  I had to call the Ford dealer at 09:00 to see if he got my part in from Salt Lake City.  If so, we would have to go into Vernal to have it installed.  We made some “straight” coffee this morning.  And made a quick breakfast of some turkey ham (it sounds gross, but it is very good) and fried eggs.  At 09:00 I confirmed we had the part and they said come on in. 

We’ve been trying to figure out where to go next.  I’m always trying to find a national forest campground near a fishing stream and my research showed that there are three west of here on Rock Creek, north of Mountain Home.  There were 3 others on another county road from there also on the Duschene River.  So we thought, since we are in Vernal, they are only an hour away, so we should check them out.  Showalter Motors replaced my part in about 45 minutes and we were out of there about 11:00. 

It was about an hour drive on all county back roads to Mountain Home, which was a tiny run down ranching town.  We took the turnoff down the county road towards the campgrounds.  It was nearly another hour from there.  We drove for miles through sagebrush meadows towards the distant Uinta Mountains.  We passed through a section of the Ute Indian Reservation on the way.  We seemed to be driving a long time and finally we saw the sign for the Ashley National Forest.  The first campground we checked out, Miner’s Gulch, had a sign at the entrance that said “Reserved.  Keep Out” or some rude sign like that.  We continued to the next one, Yellowpine.  It was in a beautiful forest, but was full of rednecks and most of the sites were reserved.  So we moved on to the last one, Stillwater Dam.  It had very small sites, mostly tenters and the river was across the street.  It was situated at the base of a huge concrete dam.  None of these excited us.  Marsha made the suggestion to stay another night at Lodgepole and I go fish the Green River.  That made sense and we decided to head back to the campground, about two hours away.

 

Here are a few pictures we took along the way to the campgrounds in the Rock River

Another cow in the road picture.  Some day

 I'll show you elk or bison or a bear.

Stopped in Vernal on the way home at a sporting goods store and got a 3-day Utah non-resident fishing license for $24.  They do not have one day fishing licenses in Utah.  Found a State Liquor Store where they sell real beer and picked some up.

We had been back and forth to Vernal several times and this time we took some pictures on the way back to the campground.  We had about a 30 mile drive to Vernal, two days in a row.  It is a scenic drive and here are some pictures:

 

Got home and made pizza, but with pizza dough this time instead of the flatbread we usually use.  It burned on the bottom but was still excellent.  We need to play with it some more to figure out how to make it without burning it.

 

Marsha rolling the dough with her homemade maple rolling pin I made for her.

 

The pre-cooked pizza.  Looks good, don't it.  (It was)

  Went inside the rest of the evening and went to bed early.

Tomorrow’s big event . . . Ed goes fishing in the Green River.