06-01-13

Yesterday we went to Dome Plateau. It is trail #37 in our back roads book and has some interesting features.

To get there we drove to the north end of Moab and turned east on highway 128. They are working on the highway, putting in a new bike path.

The highway follows the south bank of the Colorado River.
It was a pleasant drive along the river with lots of beautiful views.

We passed by a large dude ranch along the river.

We also saw rafters on the river.

After 30 miles we crossed the Dewy Bridge. Just past the bridge we turned left onto the Kokopelli Trail.

The trail starts out pretty easy

but before long you come to the rocky ledges.

We followed the trail for a couple of miles until we came to a small road to the right. We thought was the road that the book said that had an arch at the end. It turned out to be just an interesting canyon

so we returned to the main trail.

A little further down the road we turned right onto another trail and followed it to its end (about a half mile). We were looking for the arch that was called out in the book. At the end of the road I walked around for a while looking for the arch but didn’t see it. On the way in we passed a spot where you could see that there had been an arch at one time but now it was broken.

When we started this trail we were concerned that we might be the only ones out here today but when we stopped to look for the arch, two other couples in jeeps pulled up. We felt much better knowing that there would be someone behind us in case we got into trouble. We saw these two couples several times at tricky spots on the trail during the day.

We returned to the main trail and continued along. We passed another arch.

There were several places where we had views of the La Sal’s to the south.

 

There were several spots on the trail where we had to go very slow in low range.

Of course Clifford met all the challenges easily.

We had just come down this one when the two jeeps caught up with us.

We took another right turn off the main trail to check out Boca Arch for a couple of pictures.

 

Back on the trail, we headed down a secondary trail to the overlook above the Colorado River. We have been to many Colorado River overlooks but this was one of the best.

We decided to have lunch here.

We could see rafters on the river below.

After lunch we back tracked to the main trail and continued our ride.

The flowers on this plateau were spectacular with large groups of cactus and other wild flowers in bloom.

 

We have seen some of these white flowers in ones and two’s throughout the desert  

but here on the plateau they were in large groups and whole fields of them.

We stopped at some caves known as Caves Springs.

This one had a spring head in it that

fed the water trough outside.

As I wandered around the caves, I had a strong feeling of having been here before.

Eventually it occurred to me that in 2010 I had been here with a couple of other jeeps lead by a guy named Clyde. (See blog for 05-29-10)

We left the caves and continued along the trail

and stopped to check out an old mining spot where there were some abandoned cabins that were built out of railroad ties.

 

One of the buildings still had the spikes in the ties.

After leaving the cabins we got onto an easy road that took us back to highway 128. We stopped at the highway to put air back in the tires and then headed for home.

While we were traveling down the highway we tried to determine where on the ridges above the river we had stopped for lunch.

We decided that we may have had lunch somewhere on this ridge. 

It was great but we are kind of beat up from yesterdays ride so we are going to lay low today.