Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (oops, Gods)

How old does one have to be to get that reference, I wonder.  Probably most of my audience.

So, after I passed the Valley of the Gods, there was a little stretch of road called UT highway 261.  It looked to be a short little hop up to UT highway 95.  I was looking forward to some more neat scenery.  What I got was the Moki Dugway.  Key the heavy ominous music here, please.

It turns out that, little did I know, I was headed for what has been called the most dangerous drive in America by some, and the most beautiful, exciting drive by others.  The first suggestion that something unusual was in store was a sign suggesting that the next three miles was steep (10% grade), unpaved, with extremely sharp curves and switchbacks.  And that large trucks, vehicles towing trailers, and RV's were cautioned against continuing.

I wasn't nervous yet.  I should have been.

Traffic where I was was thin, I had met only a few cars coming my way, and they seemed to be just fine.  There was no one in sight behind me.  I was approaching a huge wall of reddish stone, the edge of a bluff, or butte, or mesa, or whatever, about a zillion feet high.  I couldn't see where the road was going to go.  Usually as a road crosses a range of something, hills, mountains, you see the depression or cut where it is going to go.  I could see nothing like that.  I wondered if the road were going into a tunnel.

Nope.  The pavement ended at what seemed to be 100 yards or so from the stone walls, and abruptly turned about 110 degrees right.  And I started what was to be the second scariest part of my trip.  Though I couldn't see it from the ground, the road went up and across that high bluff face, back and forth and around, a washerboard surface gravel road, wide enough for two vehicles in most places, a bit narrower than that in a couple of places.  No guardrails, no center line, no nothing, except the infinite-seeming upward sloping road.

Last night I looked this road up, and learned its name, that the bluff face is 1100 feet high, that the road climbs that distance in slightly less than 3 miles.  That it was built in the 50s for huge uranium hauling trucks to carry cargo down to the town of Mexican Hat, where there was an enrichment facility or refinery.

But all I knew then was that I had entered some twilight zone, where the slightest wrong move would send me tumbling down to my death.  Not too different from the road from Ourey to Silverton, that I haven't told you about yet, except not quite as scary as that one.  Maybe because there was a little mound of dirt at the edge of the road that kept me from seeing the very edge of the dropoff, maybe because I had already had the experience once, maybe because I wasn't always on the outside, as the twists and turns put me on the inside as often as the outside.

The stated speed limit was 15, there were lots of times when I was going 5 mph.  As I climbed, I could see vehicles before me, and perhaps 5 or 6 passed me going down on my traverse of the Dugway, which probably lasted no longer than 15 or 20 minutes, but which seemed like much longer. There were pull over places, most of which had a car or two, and people standing around looking out over the Valley of the Gods in the desert below.  But I wasn't going to stop for anything.

Except at one point I rounded a tight curve and found the road ahead really narrow, and a van was heading down.  I stopped then, and backed up around the curve to where the road was wider, so the guy could come down and get around me.  I think that spot was probably the narrowest, and of course then I was on the outside, and I gave great thanks that no one else was coming down as I crossed that part.

Finally I got to a much wider place, with a big turnout, and a waist high hurricane fence around the edge.  I stopped then, and got out, and looked around.  The desert stretched out below, filled to the east with the many tall monuments of the VotG, which seemed now like little statues or sand castles. Toward the west the bluff face, which turned out to be the edge of a mesa, I learned later, stretched out in a huge concave curve for miles and miles.  I took a picture, but like so many pictures I have taken, show nothing of the grandeur or scope or depth of the scene.

Sweeping panorama from the top of the Dugway

Detail from the center of the pano.  The blacktop road I came in on is visible; the smaller dirt road to the left traverses the Valley of the Gods.

Detail from the left of the pano.  The structures making up the Valley of the Gods are visible behind the lighter outcropping of the mesa edge we just came up across, and continue on into the vanishing background.

In my looking around on the internet last night, I found lots of youtube videos about this stretch of road, and many photos.  Excerpts from a few reality type travel channel shows as well.  Statements about how the ride south (down) was better, because you could see everything out in front of you (I had already decided I was glad I had been going up, for a similar reason). Comments from people seem split between people who loved it and people who it scared.  Color me in both camps.

At the pullout there was a van with a guy and a girl and we mutually exclaimed.  They were locals, showing visitors from AZ the sights.  The visitors never got out of the van, while I was there.  He told me about the uranium mining trucks, and that now I was at the top. That really relieved me, as I had thought that I faced a similar ride down, not knowing that I was on a mesa, and not just climbing over some two-sided feature.

The rest of the short ride on that highway was a pleasure, as my fingers' death grip on the wheel gradually relaxed.  I was on the way the one of the most beautiful parts of my drive, and I didn't even know it yet.