Paiute Trail

What a trip!

We escaped the summer heat of Phoenix for a wonderful adventure on the Paiute Trail in the Utah mountains.  The Paiute Trail is an all-terrain vehicle trail system in Southwest Utah with over 2,000 miles of trails to explore.  We stayed five days and easily could have stayed longer.  Each day we traveled 100+ miles through some amazing terrain; even playing in the snow at 11,500 feet.

Our drive sure was a pretty one.  Marysvale is an hour or so north of Bryce Canyon National Park on US 89.  We traveled through the cool pines of Flagstaff up to Lake Powell for the night.  A highlight for me was a stop ON THE LEFT at the famous Horseshoe Bend.  Mark doesn’t like to stop on the left ever and for him to do it in the motor home while towing a 24 foot trailer was huge. Horseshoe Bend is on the southern outskirts of the town of Page, maybe 2 miles from the developed edge of town.  I can’t believe we’ve gone to Lake Powell dozens of times and never knew it was that close.   It was a hot day, 105 when we pulled into the little parking lot.  The 1.5 mile long trail is sandy, so make sure you wear good shoes.  There’s something about the red rocks, they are just so pretty.  We’ve all seen pictures of the giant bend in the Colorado River but holy cow, seeing it in person was something else.  So much beauty and color.  I bet watching a sunrise or sunset is spectacular.

It sure felt weird to be at Lake Powell without the boat.  We took a long walk through the campground after dinner and seeing all the sun kissed families hanging out while towels dried on any space available along boats and trailers reminded me of our many fun trips there.  It’s time to go back.  The next morning was rather leisure for us; I think I like this no alarm clock thing.  We drove through the little town of Kanab, several small towns and farms along US 89 into Marysvale.  US 89 is a scenic drive just over the mountain east of I-15.   Marysvale sits at 5,863 feet which makes for nice cool nights even in July.

We stayed in the town of Marysvale at the South 40 RV Park.  We found it to be a good jumping off point for our rides.  For more information, check out their website at http://www.southfortyrv.net .  This is a relatively new RV park and the owners clearly put a lot of time and effort into the park.  The sites are huge.  We were in a 70′ long site that was plenty wide so you didn’t feel crammed in and they placed our group together, which was wonderful.  Sometimes it’s hard to get a group of six rigs together.  They’ve laid out the sites where the front faces north so there is great shade every afternoon.  We were there at the tail end of the Brian Head fire which led to a fire ban.  Never fear as several of us had our Campfire in a Can!

No alarm clocks on this trip!  We headed out every morning loaded with lunch, snacks and plenty of water.  The trails were easy to access right from the campground.  Mark talked to Jim, the campground owner every morning for trail information.  Mark told Jim what we wanted to see and Jim highlighted the best trail and what to watch for.  This was a huge bonus and one of the reasons we will go back.  Jim knows the trails system well.

Snow!  We played in the snow in July!  We were above the tree line at 11,500 feet.  There were a few really big patches of snow left and we took full advantage.  A few snowballs were thrown as well as a couple of snow angels.  There was one big patch that covered the trail.  Oh, we had fun blasting through that.  The wildflowers were out in full force and we saw more butterflies than we could count.  Deer sightings were commonplace.  We led the trail rides and I had my eyes peeled for animals.  A quick “deer” from me led Mark to a quick stop as quietly as possible.  Mark’s cousin Keith and his wife Linda were directly behind us most of the rides and if I missed the picture, she did a great job getting it.

Our first day also had some misadventure; which is always more fun.  We were toggling between two maps, let’s just say one was way better than the other.  That other map stayed in the RV the rest of the trip.  As with all map reading, you KNOW you are at one point when in fact you are way, way off.  After playing in the snow, we traveled down the other side of the mountain through a ski area and several little lakes (or big ponds).  We knew we’d have to be on the highway for a mile or two so we weren’t surprised when we hit the highway.  Our misadventure came when we turned right instead of left; only we didn’t realize it for several miles.  The map showed a little ways down the highway, we’d see the trail on the left.  Check, trail is there.  But, it was a 50-inch wide trail.  Our RZRs were too wide.  All trails on the map were marked as to what sized UTV was okay.  50-inch wide trails were clearly marked.  No worries, we thought, it must be the next trail.  And so it went for a few miles until we found a turnout for a map check.  We had a good enough signal to pinpoint exactly where we were on the road and we realized we should have turned left when we hit the highway.  Thankfully this highway was nice and quiet, we only saw a few cars.  Off we went on the correct trail to more adventure and some lunch.  We climbed until there was a nice clearing with several deer.  Time to stop and take pictures!  They almost posed for us.  They would walk away, then stop and turn their heads around to see what we were doing.  Our loop trail was taking us to the town of Circleville, south of Marysvale.  We started down the trail as it went down the mountain and were greeted with a series of switchbacks.  Fun for us in a 2-seater.  Not so much for the three 4-seaters in our group.  We stopped at another clearing and when everyone joined us, it was an animated description of their wild ride down.  “I knew you wouldn’t take us anywhere dangerous, Mark, but man, I had to three-point most of those turns” was a recurring theme.  We had lots of laughs the rest of the trip with the request of no more switchbacks.

Not far from the campground is the Bullion Canyon & Miners Park Recreation Trail.  It was another beautiful trail; the trees hung low and we crisscrossed a flowing creek.  We passed signs about the mines but didn’t pay much attention to them until we stopped at an area large enough to park 6 our RZR’s.  Here we found the Bully Boy Mine.  We had a teacher in our group and right then and there she decided to do a unit on the mines.  She carefully photographed the entire scene and typed notes into her phone (sorry, no pen and paper in the RZR).  This was one of those great little gems we love to find on trail rides.

The waterfalls, oh the waterfalls.  These weren’t huge like Yosemite’s but they were beautiful nonetheless.  Our last day Mark told Jim we wanted to see waterfalls and he did not disappoint.  We went in and out of several canyons.  You’d think that the waterfalls at the back of the canyons would be similar. Similar terrain, similar exposure.  No, they were all so different.  One looked like it was coming straight out of a hole in the rock.  Another cascaded gently over rocks while another streamed almost straight down, bouncing off the rocks far below.

Our time on the Paiute was not long enough but alas it was time to go.  Two in our group headed home to California while the rest of us headed down to Bryce Canyon for a few days.  More adventure awaits.