This Land Is Our Land

The view through our windshield while camping in Canyonlands National Park.

We left Moab, Utah, after lunch on Saturday. We crossed the Colorado River and marveled about being alongside the Colorado River more than a week ago while we stayed at the Grand Canyon. Big, big river.

North of Moab, we found a two-lane road that took off to the left. Down that road we went, looking for a campsite for the next few days. A free campsite, of course. Thanks to the federal government – and the American people - there are millions of acres of land in the west that are owned by the United States. But these are not national parks. The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for taking care of these lands.

If you live in the eastern half of the U.S., chances are you rarely come in contact with BLM land. But this is a national treasure. The BLM leases a few million acres to cattlemen and their cows roam at will on the unfenced land. There are lots of cattle grids on the roads. And then, thank you America, there are designated areas for camping. You’re only allowed to stay at a site for 14 days. Then you must move along. No squatting!  I have learned about this national treasure through being a member of the Escapees Club, a group of full-time live-aboard people who have built an enormous compendium of knowledge about these – and other - camping lands. As a member, I was able to buy and download an 840-plus page file that is devoted to free camping sites in the U.S. and Canada.

And so we have come down the little two-lane road about 12 miles and we saw an area designated for camping. We drove down a dirt road, found a group camping site that was taken over by VW buses – maybe 15 of them. No room for us. So we retraced our steps and then took another dirt road down to another area. We saw a honking great motorhome on a rise and there was a fifth-wheel trailer alongside it. It looked promising but we dared not go down the dirt road without knowing what we faced in case there was no place to turn and leave. So we stopped our rig on the main dirt road and walked into the bush to reconnoiter. 

We came upon gold: a gorgeous site on the edge of an escarpment. We look out to the north and to the west.  We have nothing but mountains all around us. Mt. Tomasaki, 12,271 feet, and its brother Mt. Peale, 12,721 feet, are on our eastern horizon. Both are cloaked in thick snow. But we’re in gorgeous weather – 59 degrees as the sun sets on our left.

We’ve set up house on the escarpment with only cattle in view, no people. Up the hill behind us, a couple has been wrestling with a tent. It took about an hour but they seem to have mastered it and it no longer is flying like a green flag. I wandered over to greet another couple who is parked about 100 yards away behind our rig. They came in from Eagle, Colorado, today. After we chatted for a while, they told us their goal is live aboard fulltime and do what we do.

Life is not without its stresses, of course. Earlier this week, we were playing out this exact scenario, camping in Canyonlands National Park. We’d driven in there on a whim after Jo spotted a tiny note on our atlas which simply said “Newspaper Rock”. We had no idea what that meant, but we were up for a little side trip so we veered off the main road and bumped along a two-lane “open range” road, which means, “Be careful. There are live cattle wandering and which might bolt onto the roadway.” And they did. At least, one did a couple of days earlier. Its bloated body lay with legs in the air beside the road. As good a warning as any motorist needs.

Some of the hundreds of petroglyphs at the rock.

We took our time and wound our way downhill, via hairpin bends that would be great for a sports car, but not so much fun for a 38-foot motorhome with a Honda Fit tagging along behind it.

Newspaper Rock was worth the trip, though. It was a spectacular petroglyph site of the ancient peoples who lived in this area between 550-1300 A.D. The rock is maybe 35 feet tall and 100 feet wide. Its dark red face had been stained almost black and the early peoples had used the smooth surface as a “newspaper” or blackboard on which they made all manner of drawings. There were turtles, rabbits, hunters with spears and arrows, even a horseman with a mounted Indian. The site’s explanatory plaque did not even try to offer explanations of “why” this was here. It just is. And it’s a treasure.

I stopped by and chatted with a National Parks worker who was cleaning out the bathrooms at the rock. I asked him where we might be able to find a campsite for a few nights. He looked at the size of our rig and suggested there really were only two places in Canyonlands that could cope with a rig our size. He suggested we try about 18 miles further into the park but warned the slots fill up quickly.

We drove the Honda in so we wouldn’t waste diesel fuel on a wild goose chase. We found one camping area but Jo was unhappy it had no gravel on the road in and she feared we might bog down. So on we went and came to Indian Creek. We circled the area and found most of the sites were occupied by tenters, with cars or vans. But we found there was a group camping site, occupied by two rigs with lots of room for us at the far end of the area.

We scooted back to our motorhome and drove back out, hoping no one would grab our space before we got there. We were successful. So we set up shop under a sheltering cliff. We had a million-dollar view of the distant mountains. And we had rabbits wandering at will in front of our windshield – thus providing night and day entertainment for Ian and Fiona.

But the best laid plans often go awry. And they did just that when the sun went down and our solar panels stopped pumping energy into our six house batteries. Within an hour of sunset, our battery meter began to warn us that our voltage was slipping fast. And our refrigerator door panel began to flash a warning of low voltage.

We turned everything off and began a worrying night. We went to bed early but sleep was impossible. I schemed about remedies. We were too far off the beaten path to have any cellphone service and that made it impossible to use the internet to find replacement batteries. 

We slept intermittently and I told Jo I wanted to get up before the dawn and go through each cell of each battery in our bank to find out which cells were bad. So we were up in the pre-dawn blackness at 5:30 a.m., with my hydrometer, measuring the specific gravity of all 18 cells. Four of the six batteries had cells that gave me readings that indicated there was no life left in those cells.

We knew this was almost inevitable after I installed the solar panels on our roof. The fellow who did the installation warned me that the weak link in the chain was the battery bank. Because we have no idea how old the batteries were when we bought the motorhome three years ago, we thought it was just barely possible that these are original batteries which would place them at 10 years old. 

I had asked my Alfa Owners group online for an opinion, and one of the best helpers came back to me with the opinion that 10 years on batteries is not impossible, particularly if the batteries have never been stressed. His opinion was that the way people use their motorhomes usually means they keep them plugged into shore power almost 100 percent of the time. So the batteries never get depleted. Batteries have a lifespan that is measured by the number of times they are discharged and recharged. If they mostly are sitting plugged in they never get discharged, he said.

Anyway, we decided we should start the diesel engine at get on the road as soon as we could see the cows on the roadway. How did I do that with dead batteries, you ask? Happily, we have two 12-volt batteries back with the engine and their job is to be there to start the diesel engine and not much else. We were back at the main road to Moab by 8 a.m. That allowed us to stop and be back in communication through the internet. I searched for a store that would carry 6-volt wet cell batteries and phoned the store. 

Derrick, the manager, told me he could get us fixed up if we could get to him. We got to him in another 90 minutes but Derrick said he only had four batteries but would be happy to order six fresh one and get them to Moab by 8 a.m. the next day.

Now we had to find a place where we could plug into shore power for the day and/or night. Not so easy to do in this humming little town of 5,000 people. Everyone had pre-booked their camping site at all 15 campgrounds in town. I was getting depressed and a little bewildered about our options when one campground owner suggested we try a new campground that had recently opened in town. We did and they had a single site available for a single night only. We grabbed it.

And Derrick, true to his word, had the new batteries for us when we arrived at his store at 11 a.m. Saturday. It took a couple of hours to label every cable and connection and Derrick was decent enough to pull the old batteries from my rig and insert the new units into their place. He left me to do the wiring and cleaning.

Now, we sit parked in majestic and splendid isolation on the edge of our escarpment. Sunday morning broke cold and bleak. Temperatures were in the low 40s and rain swept through. As soon as the dawn broke, however, the solar energy began to move from the panels into the new batteries. I sit, mesmerized, not even understanding how that is possible on such a dark and dreary day. Yet we are receiving energy from a hidden sun. Magical!

Canyonlands National Park is an place of overwhelming majesty and peacefulness.