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Tag: middle park granary

Blue Mountain Shadows: Beef Basin to Cedar Mesa

Southern Utah Wanderings | Friday – Friday, October 1-8, 2021

This year for our annual week-long trek into Southern Utah, Jared and I started out in the Beef Basin area and then we explored our way over to Cedar Mesa. It has been a while since either of us had spent much time around Beef Basin and I was also really hoping that we would be able to spend some quality time around the Dark Canyon Plateau and Elk Ridge areas along the way. The trip started out great and we found plenty of new rock art and ruin sites, but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate with us on the second half of this trip and we had to change our plans multiple times because of storms and slick muddy roads. At one point we even stopped to help winch a truck back onto the road that was sliding off. One of the unexpected benefits of the poor weather was that it chased us closer to the Abajo Mountains than we were originally planning to go, and they were in peak falls colors at the time! At the end of the week we found out that President Biden was restoring the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, which was fitting since we were sitting in camp within the newly restored boundary. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of this trip, so please enjoy plenty of photos from our journey below.

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Beef Basin Weekend | Friday

Friday, October 8, 2010

On Friday morning Amanda and I loaded up the Jeep and headed to Beef Basin for a three-day weekend. I had been planning this weekend for a while since I wanted to spend some quality time exploring Beef Basin. We made it to Monticello to fuel up and then took UT 211 towards the Needles District of Canyonlands, where we turned off onto the Cottonwood Canyon Road. I had been worried about the condition of this road with all the rain we had recently, but we found it in good condition and it was dried out (I’ve been on this road when it was wet before, and it’s no fun). We climbed up towards Horse Mountain until we reached the Beef Basin Road turnoff and dropped back down into House Park where we setup a basecamp for the weekend.

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