Our plans for this summer had been to tour the New Mexico mountain trails and national forests, but with wildfires spreading across the state, we had to redirect and head north. It wasn’t the pine forest we’d been hoping for, but the Valley of the Gods is home to arid desert landscapes and rocketing plateaus that made up for the loss.
We arrived on Thursday at about two in the afternoon. We spent the next hour driving up and down the dirt road scoping out campsites that could accommodate not only our own overlanding setup, but also have enough room to spare for a 35ft airstream rig that would be joining us on our campout a couple days later. More on that in a minute.
Once we’d found a spot with a good view of the distant cliffs and hoodoos, we popped up the tent and unfurled the batwing awning for the evening. We whipped up a simple chicken salad dinner and spent the remaining daylight finding out the names of the cliff formations around us.
One of the best things about desert camping are the night skies. With little to no light pollution, the stars glow unhindered. However, as Aaron’s astrophotography from that night showed, the stars weren’t the only thing glowing in the Utah outback. The green light in this picture is called airglow, a phenomena produced by solar radiation hitting the Earth’s upper atmosphere. It’s like the aurora borealis of the southwest, and you can see it ripple like waves on water in the time lapses Aaron took.
We spent the next couple of days either hiding under our awning or hiding in the tent as the summer heat came down on our exposed camp. Unexpected gusts of thirty-five mile an hour wind would come rushing across the sand about every half hour to flip our solar panels, lift our awning, and on two occasions, even flip the tent shut on itself. I was inside the tent the second time this happened and nearly got pancaked into the mattress.
Every now and then we’d get a friendly wave from passing overlanders, bike packers, and even tourists. It was unusual to see so many street cars and rentals on a dirt back road like that, but apparently it was a bit of a tourist destination. There were several times these cars would drive by us, stop, reverse a few feet, and then take pictures of both the landscape and of our rig. We didn’t mind, but we couldn’t help but find it a little amusing.
Two days after we’d arrived, Aaron’s parents came crawling down the unpaved road with their airstream. It’s not every day you see one of these giants boon docking in the middle of nowhere, and it was a trick for them to get everything level on the uneven campground, but they eventually figured it out. It wasn’t long before Sh’ma, their white shepherd service dog, was racing around and covering herself in the fine, orange powder of the valley.
Normally we’re not ones to partake in glamping, but the summer heat soon had us under the AC inside the trailer and surfing the web through the Starlink satellite system hooked up outside. With everyone together, we sat down for a Shavuout meal and had some wine.
The day had come to pack up, but there were a few more things on our list before we turned our sights back home. First on that list was making sure the airstream could make it back up the road to the highway as the entrance ramp was steep and unpaved. Although we were a little anxious at looking at the incline, the trailer made it up and over the lip to the highway without a hitch.
With Aaron’s parents safely on their way home, we turned around and hit the trail that wove deep into the Utah outback. It was so well maintained and travelled that it’s hard to really call it a “trail”, but the views certainly didn’t disappoint. We passed through several rock gardens and even got to fly the drone between a gap between two massive pillars formed by the eroding plateaus. We even saw a cowboy taking his horse out for a ride through the desert scenery as if we’d stumbled onto a movie set by mistake.
There was only one last stop we wanted to make before hitting the highway, and that was the Moki Dugway, an old mining road that hugged the face of a 1,100ft cliff. Despite the road having almost no guardrails or pavement, the ride was smooth and so well maintained that even a semi truck passed us on the climb. The view at the top was the perfect send off to the trip, and we took it in before finally setting our sights back on New Mexico.
