Moki Dugway

Searching for the Moki Dugway

2017 Motorcycle trip

Like every year I spend the winter and spring months researching places that I would like to travel to on my motorcycle. One of my goals when purchasing my first motorcycle was to visit as many state and National Parks as I could, and all of my motorcycle trips are based off of that goal. As the summer days started to get shorter and shorter, I realized that a trip heading north to Yellowstone and Glacier was probably not a wise decision so I set my sights towards the south. There are 5 National Parks in Utah and living in Utah just about my whole life, I have been to all of them many times, but not all in one single trip. So the goal for our 2017 motorcycle trip was now set, we would go through all 5 parks and then sprinkle in some State Parks and National Monuments as well and decorate our trailer with stickers to memorialize our travels.

Early on in the planning, I decided it would be best to do a counter-clockwise path around the state of Utah because the more remote areas could be knocked out first, and then the last half of our trip it would be easier for us to find grocery stores (and hotels/hot tubs) if needed. Arches National Park and Canyonlands would be the first parks to visit. This is a place we go to at least once a year, so we weren’t going to spend much time there. The south east corner of Utah is probably the least known area of the state for me and I knew it would have the biggest question marks. Natural Bridges National Monument is a place I have been to before and I knew they had campsites, so I decided to pencil that in as a second night camp site. As I started to look for where our next stop would be I realized that Natural Bridges would kind of put us out in the middle of nowhere where we would either have to back-track back east towards Blanding, or keep heading north-west. Highway 95 to the north west is a very scenic highway that I have been on, but it would really take us too far to the north and make our stops to Zion’s, Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef an additional loop back to the south. That’s when I saw little old Highway 261 almost directly south from Natural Bridges that connected back up near the big city of Mexican Hat Utah, which was where I wanted to pass through to begin with. As I was reading about this highway 261 I read about a 3 mile section called “The Moki Dugway.” When researching this Moki Dugway on the internet I read numerous articles that had keywords such as “One of Utah’s most dangerous roads” or “scariest roads in Utah” and I knew I had to do it! A bonus of going down The Moki Dugway was that there was a State Park at the bottom of the road that I have never been to before where we could camp for the night. This park is called called Goosenecks State Park and has turned out to be one of my favorite Parks in Utah. The rest of the trip would take us over to St. George Utah where we would go through Zions, Bryce Canyon, Grand Staircase and Capitol Reef on way back home. These areas are very familiar to us and it’s a route we have taken many times before on our bikes, so a lot of the anticipation of what we might see was slightly dampened a little.

The trip started just as planned, staying in Moab at The Slickrock Campground for the first night with a very quick drive up to Arches to get a sticker for the trailer. We headed down to the southern entrance of Canyonlands and stopped at Newspaper Rock before heading into the Visitor center where we grabbed a quick lunch. As I was carefully placing the Canyonlands sticker on my trailer I noticed some big Cumulonimbus clouds boiling up over the mountains between Canyonlands and Natural Brides. I had watched the weather before we left and I knew we were going to be travelling through the desert southwest during the monsoon season, so the odds were going to be high that we would get rain. Moving on with our trip I knew that I had better start paying closer attention to the clouds. We topped off the gas tank in Blanding and started to head over to Natural Bridges to set up camp. We hit our first snag at the entrance when we were told that all of the campsites were full and that we could not stay there. We inquired about where we could pitch a tent and the park ranger said that we could camp in Bears Ears National Monument and that the road was just 2 miles away. We turned around and made it to the dirt road heading int Bears Ears. While this was a bit of a set back, it actually gave us 2 additional bonus “points.” 1. It was another National Monument we could check off the list and 2. The camping was free!. It was a very steep and bumpy, loose gravel road with a lot of uneven drainage ditches. Navigating up and down the road on a road bike while pulling a loaded trailer was not too fun, but I just kept telling myself it would be good practice for the Moki Dugway the next day. We set up camp, dropped the trailer and drove back into Natural Bridges to do some hiking. We couldn’t spend to much time in the park because it was at the end of the day, but we got a few miles in before sunset. The evening sky was absolutely amazing that night as there was a thunderstorm that was just glancing past us, and the setting sun painted vibrant colors on the clouds. We got back to camp right after sunset and had dinner in the dark. I stayed up for a few hours to try to get some astro photography done, but it was just too cloudy.

The next morning we woke up to blue skies. This gave us a great feeling because we felt like we dodged a big storm yesterday and that things were looking really good this day. We took our time getting up and getting breakfast because we knew that the ride on the bike would be really short since Goosenecks State park was only a few mile away. I was planning to spend a good chunk of the day going up and down the Moki Dugway to get plenty of pictures and videos of this amazing road and was excited that this would be the highlight of the day. As we were starting to clean up breakfast and break down our camp I noticed those thunderstorm clouds beginning to boil up again and started to wonder if we had lollygagged a bit too much. By the time we had the bike and trailer all packed up I could tell that rain was going to be in our near future. As we started south on Highway 261 I could see a wall of rain coming in from the southwest….which was from my right side. I began to get worried about how bad this “most dangerous road in Utah” would be in the rain. What makes the Moki Dugway so dangerous is that it is a dirt road carved into the side of a cliff that drops 1200 feet to the valley below… with no guardrails. Pulling a loaded and heavy trailer down a muddy dirt road on a road bike… what could possibly go wrong? My expectations of taking my time, going up and down the dugway was erased by a sense of urgency to beat this approaching wall of water and I started to speed up. I kept expecting to see the official top of the Moki Dugway sign after every curve in the road, but it just seemed like I would never get there. The frequency of the lightning I had started seeing seemed to pick up and I was starting to hear some rumbles of thunder over the road and wind noise. A few drops of rain started to bead off of our face shields, and I resigned myself to the fact that we would be making our way down the dugway in the rain. We rounded a corner, and finally I could see that “Moki Dugway” sign that I had been reading about for the last month! As the pavement ended I pulled up to the sign to quickly grab one picture with my cell phone before we dropped off the ledge of The Dugway. As I got off the bike the lightning and rain to my right was telling me not to waste any time! I took that one picture and we quickly started down the surprisingly smooth dirt road. I really wanted to stop and take more photos as we started down the switchbacks but I knew that storm was almost on top of us so I kept on navigating down the road. About 3/4 of the way down I could see a big tractor in the road below. It was a grader that was doing maintenance on the road, which explained why it was so smooth. I passed the grader and gave him a wave, but even the ungraded portion to the bottom wasn’t that bad at all. I honestly don’t know why I was so worried about the Moki Dugway and I don’t really think it is that dangerous. As we got to the bottom, the road turned back to pavement and we headed southeast away from the storm. I knew the next task was to get to Goosenecks State park and set up camp before the storm hit, so we continued on at a decently fast pace. We got to Goosenecks and park ranger said we could camp anywhere we wanted, but the edges of the cliffs were really windy. We headed her advice and picked a site that had a picnic table with a small pavilion that was a short distance from the edge of the cliff and just as we got our tent set up, we got hit with our first wave of the storm. This brought high winds and hail. All we could do was to throw rocks inside our (mostly set-up) tent so it didn’t blow away as we tried to stay dry under the pavilion. The rest of that day was spent hunkering down while wave after wave of thunderstorms pelted us. They were very short bursts of heavy wind, rain, and hail followed by brief periods of sun, and during these periods we spent a lot of time trying to shore up our tent and dig drainage ditches around it. The payoff for all of that work was that we were blessed with one of the most amazing rainbows I have seen and everyone around the rim of the canyon was out taking pictures. As the sun went down, the skies cleared out and I was able to spend a few hours walking around the edge of a cliff taking pictures of the Milky Way.

That night was remarkably calm and quite a bit cooler than the first part of the trip. After the day’s fiasco of only being able to quickly get one picture of the Moki Dugway, I was quite a bit anxious to find out what tomorrow would be like and I slowly drifted off to sleep knowing that the day ended on a very high note! I woke up really early in the morning with the hopes of doing some time-lapse photography. Not knowing what I would see, I very slowly unzipped the tent door trying hard not to wake up my wife. After I slipped out and zipped the door back up I turned back around trying to get my eyes to adjust from having a good solid night’s rest. It was still pretty dark outside but I instantly felt like the trip was cursed! What I was hoping for was some broken clouds overhead that would really light up with color as the sun came up. I was going to have an epic, colorful sunrise that could only be seen in the southwest desert after a good thunderstorm. What I saw was clear skies above me and a thick, heavy blanket of clouds to the east right where the sun would be coming up. There would be no chance of a good time-lapse I thought to myself as I turned back around to retreat into my warm sleeping bag. Just as I reached to unzip the tent I figured that I would not be able to sleep anyway and that I would just end up waking up my wife, so I decided to head out and start the time-lapse anyway. I walked out to the edge of the canyon to set up my tripod and camera pointing right into the thick layer of clouds that I knew was going to block the sunrise anyway. I set my camera settings to take one picture every 2 seconds and then started the time-lapse series. I left my camera running like that and turned around to take a little hike. It was still too early for the sun to rise and it appeared that I was the only one up so I knew I could leave it running for a while. After a few minutes I turned back around to go check on my camera and I noticed that the thick clouds had started to sink bit lower and I was now able to see the ridge where the sun would hopefully rise. I got back to my camera and there a guy that was sitting down next to it. We started talking about our travels and where we were heading to, when wouldn’t you know it… the sun’s rays crested over the ridge and blasted us with an instant burst of bright orange warmth. We watched the clouds dance around the sun for a few minutes and then I turned the camera around to point to the south west. I thought it might look good to see how the canyon below me would light up as the sun rose higher in the sky. Sure enough, with the clear skies above it was easy to watch the sharp edges of the sun’s rays reach deeper and deeper down into the canyon below. I learned a valuable lesson right there about letting go of my expectations and to just enjoy the moment as it is. To this day I am stunned with how amazing that dense layer of clouds actually were. In real life, it seemed like there was no movement at all. After I processed the series of images, it blows me away with how dynamic the motion actually was. If I would try to describe it, I would say It seems like a combination of rivers that are stacked on each other with the current flowing in opposite directions and some waves of clouds splashing off the mountain in the background. And thank you Mr. Camper who had the audacity to park his camper right in the center of my frame to give it an extra emphasis of scale!

The rest of the trip we endured perfect fall weather. We drove south passing through the Iconic “Forest Gump Point” Heading into Monument Valley. We zig-zagged west bouncing back and forth between Arizona and Utah Where we finally got a hotel in St. George and enjoyed a good soaking in a hot tub. We climbed to the top of Angels Landing in Zions National Park and descended down to the Bottom of Wall Street in Bryce Canyon. We hopped onto my favorite road (Highway 12) Through Escalante National Monument, and grabbed one last sticker in Capitol Reef before we finally made it home.

Sometimes the adversity we face leads us to a greater appreciation of the good things in life. There were 2 things on this trip of 2017 that did not go the way I planned. I only got one picture at the Moki Dugway… and you couldn’t even see the breathtaking switchbacks heading down the side of the cliff. The weather at Goosenecks State park wasn’t ideal and the colorful sunrise I had envisioned did not happen. What I was blessed with though was being out a full week with my wife travelling on our motorcycle through some of the most epic landscapes on this planet! Oh, and one last benefit…. It turns out that The Moki Dugway and Goosenecks State Park are now 2 of my favorite places, and I now have a reason to go back and explore that part of my state!