Desert Off-Road Trip 2015: White Rim Trail & Lockhart Basin

[DirtyLarry]

Well, we all made it back unscathed from yet another week bouncing around the southwestern desert backcountry. 2015 was the 7th year my buddies and I have been doing a long distance trip to some desert destination somewhere in the Southwest. The first part of this trip was somewhat of a repeat of our 2011 trip being the White Rim Trail. The reason we returned back to do WRT again was due to the Mineral Bottom side of the WRT being washed out in 2011. At that time we could only do about ¾ of the trail and return back the way we came. This time we went back to see it in its entirety and it was well worth the trip. Actually, WRT is always worth the trip no matter how many times you’ve been there.

Again this year we had friends from around the Southwest met up. 3 rigs from Phoenix; Lance’s ’70 Chevy Suburban (Lance arrived later for the second part of the trip), Don’s Landcruiser 80 series (okay, it is actually badged as a Lexus) and Tony’s 2005 Jeep Rubicon. Then one of my High School buddies from California with his Dodge Ram Cummins fitted with a Phoenix camper similar to mine….and of course, Bill in his ’02 Dodge/Cummins and I from Colorado. We had AZ, CA and CO well represented for a week in Utah.

On with the story…

My buddy Bill and I rolled out of Pueblo early on Friday, May 15th with the hoods pointed straight towards Moab, Utah to meet up with the rest of our crew for the week. The plan was for everyone to roll into Moab Friday evening, grab dinner and be ready to roll out first thing Saturday morning to head on the 35 mile jaunt to the WRT trail head near the Island In The Sky Visitors center. The Saturday morning wagon round up came early with 5 eager crews ready to escape the daily grind for the week. We were actually ahead of schedule this morning. As with most of the Southwest having an unusually wet spring, Canyonlands was no exception. We woke up to pretty soggy Saturday morning then once we arrived at the Canyonlands Visitor Center we learned the 5 mile long Shafer Trail that leads down the canyon wall from the Visitors Center to the actual White Rim Trail was closed due to greasy mud on the steep narrow canyon trail. Our choices were to wait until the sun came out and dried up the surface mud or return back to Moab and enter the Canyonlands park through the Potash Trail entrance, which the rangers said would add about 1.5hr to the trip just to meet up with the WRT. Well, since none of us have the patience to sit around and wait to see how long it takes mud to dry we took off back to Moab. That was a bummer 35 miles we didn’t count on! Actually, the detour didn’t hurt our feelings any as we haven’t seen the Potash trail portion before anyway.

Alas, the dirt road we had been looking for so we could purge air from our tires and bug out! This was at the Potash mine as we aired down.


From the Potash entrance it doesn’t take long before the desert Canyonlands eye candy starts to sweeten!








Various sites along the way…




First stop…Muscleman’s Arch. Buddy Tony walking around out on the arch


My copilot (mother in-law) and buddy Bill posing on the arch


View from the top of the arch


Another view of the arch. The arch almost becomes invisible in pictures. Oh, and at this arch we met some fellers riding bicycles that just had come down the Shafer trail. As it turned out, the park opened the trail about 1.5hr from when we were up at the time. Oh, well…




We still had another good 35 miles or so to reach our reserved campsite at Gooseberry.