Leaving Salt Lake City (finally)

Even though Mark just got back from his trip to Oklahoma, Denisa has been in the Salt Lake City for nine days, and we are ready to hit the road!  We appreciate the fact that Mountain Shadows campground offered us a new site, and Denisa knew that she could have driven there and set up the motor home all by herself.  But she is certainly glad that she didn't have to do that.  So instead of both of us going to the trouble of moving within the same campground, and paying the high prices of a city campground (with low electricity), we headed south to a new place.  

Denisa was certainly glad to be sitting in the passenger seat as we headed south on the twelve-lane portion of I-15.  The construction still had the south bound lanes split into two groups, and the wind was blowing a gale.  When it started raining, we wondered if anything else would make our departure from Salt Lake more challenging.  Denisa forgot to take a picture until we were out of the worst of the construction, but here was her view from the rain-spotted windshield.

We were headed to the tiny town of Nephi (pronounced Nee-fie).  Mark drove forward into a back-in site so we had a view of the mountains from our big windshield.  This is the southern edge of the Wasatch Mountains, and we loved our view of Mount Nebo. At 11,928 feet, it the highest mountain in the Wasatch range and one of the tallest in the state of Utah.  We'll be hiking there later in our stay.

This area of Utah desperately needs rain.  The tall prairie grass in the field in front of us is a beautiful gold color, but is brittle and dry.  We drove south to Yuba State Park, and found this drought has caused the lake levels to go down so much it is just 13% of its normal levels. That means that very long docks are high and dry.

 In an area that was supposed to be covered with water, we found a snake that was glad to be high and dry.

We had planned to kayak on the narrow parts of the lake that we had seen on the map, but the ranger explained that those narrow sections were now dry.  So we opted for a walk around the shrunken lake instead.  We could walk on the enlarged beach areas, and how far could it take to walk around a lake that is just 13% of its former self?  We headed out on this short walk without drinking water, and realized that it was further than we thought.  We had walked almost 3 miles when we topped a ridge and saw a long neck of water that stretched too far to walk around.  

We stood on that ridge and considered our options.  We could ask one of the boaters on the lake for a ride across the narrow neck, but that would still involve a very long walk of an unknown length.  (That would also take a lot of courage to ask a complete stranger for that favor, but we know that Denisa has done that before.)  We considered a swim across the neck, but had no way to keep Mark's phone dry.  So we had to admit defeat, and turned around and walked all the way back the way we had come.  The good news is that going this direction we had mountain views to walk toward.

So we hiked almost 6 miles and got no where, and we were mighty thirsty by the time we got back to the car where we had left our drinks.  This is proof that not all of our adventures turn out the way we had planned.  But the good news is that we got some good exercise and explored a new area.