Grand Staircase (Off) Road Trip - Escalante Day 5

Escalante Day 5 – Posey Lake Road and Devil’s Backbone

Friday, October 22, 2021

It’s hard to believe today is our last day in Escalante, the week has gone by so fast.  It’s getting repetitive, but once again we woke up to a beautiful day with a few high clouds, but mostly blue sky.  It was also the warmest day of the week, but where we went today was quite a bit cooler.

The plan for the day was to take a shorter trip and be back to the house by 3:00 or 4:00 and do some preliminary packing so we can get an early start home tomorrow morning.  We decided to do a scenic loop drive to the west of Escalante that would take us up and over a 10,500 foot pass.

The red line is our route today and the blue line is our side trip to the Devil's Backbone Bridge.

The first section of our drive is on Posey Lake Road that starts in Escalante and goes up into the mountains.  We started our drive and after about 15 miles, we came to the intersection of Hell’s Backbone Road and decided to do a side trip.   

We have driven Hell’s Backbone Road before and it is a nice drive with some spectacular views, but the real feature is the Hell’s Backbone Bridge and the deep gorge it crosses.  Until 1937 there was no bridge and the road ended at the gorge, but a bridge was built by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp) to create a shortcut from Escalante to Boulder.  It’s hard to believe this was a shortcut considering the modern highway that connects the two towns today, but then it was a long arduous journey so the Hell’s Backbone Bridge was a big deal when it was built.  The original wooden bridge lasted until 1965 when the wood timbers were replaced with metal and then updated again in 2005.

It's hard to get a clear view of the bridge so this will have to do.

From the Hell’s Backbone Bridge area, you look down on the remote and pristine Death Hollow area that is only accessible by hiking.  The views were amazing and made the 22 mile round-trip side trip worthwhile.

From the bridge we returned to Posey Lake Road and continued our journey for a few more miles until we reached Posey Lake.  Posey Lake has a campground and picnic area, but the campground is closed for the season as there is already snow in the area.  We decided to stop for lunch and had the whole place to ourselves; we didn’t hear a single vehicle go by the whole time we were there.  The road is dirt, but is very well maintained and drivable by any auto.

Lunchtime at Posey Lake.

We had been looking forward to seeing some fall color on our journey and we did at the start of our drive today where there were lots of cottonwood trees, but as we reached the higher elevations the cottonwoods disappeared and replace by aspen as a source for fall color.  Unfortunately, it was already winter up at Posey Lake and the aspens had lost all of their leaves already.

After finishing our lunch, we continued on Posey Lake Road, but the driving became a bit more difficult.  The road was still maintained, but now there was snow, slush and mud on the road that made driving a little more difficult and would get worse as we went on.  We were certainly glad to have our 4-wheel drive for that.

A few miles up the road from Posey Lake is Cyclone Lake and in one of my photo guidebooks I have used for this trip, the author said that if you go to this lake at the right time in the fall, the fall color of the aspen trees lining the lake is beautiful.  Well, not only were the aspen trees bare of all their leaves, there was no water at all in the lake and it didn’t look like there had been any lately.  Oh well, you win some and you lose some.

Just past Cyclone Lake we came to a turnoff for Forest Road 140 and this was the road we were going to take.  It would take us up and over a 10,500 foot pass to an area known as Griffin Top.  We were beginning to get a little worried as we thought if we are having snow in the road now, what will it be like at 10,000 feet?  We saw a truck full of cut logs coming from the opposite direction (the first vehicle we had seen since the Hell’s Backbone area).  We were going very slow as we passed since the road is quite narrow so we stopped and asked about road conditions ahead and he told us that if we had 4-wheel drive we’d be fine.  It turned out he and his wife sell firewood and were hauling a load back.  They had a huge load of wood on a not so big truck, but they seemed to be moving along just fine.

The road did get worse and at times we had to drive through quite a bit of snow, but it was doable and we made it.  For people who live in a climate where it snows, it may seem like we were worrying for nothing, but we live in an area where it never snows so driving in it is very foreign to us.  Plus, if you start to slide in some places the only place to go is over the side and down.

The driving here wasn't bad, but there were times where there was deep slushy snow and mud that made us glad we had 4-wheel drive.

After the pass we started back down and the snow gradually lessened as we started on the last part of the loop back to the main highway.  Further down the road, the area opened up from forested plateau to sweeping vistas of the area below all the way to Capitol Reef National Park to the north.

As we got lower, we turned off of the Forest Road 140 onto Forest Road 17 that is called Main Canyon Road (also called Old Escalante Road).  Main Canyon Road follows Birch Creek and we started to see the cottonwood trees again.  They were mostly past their peak, but really spectacular in some areas and we made many photo stops.

 

Finally we were back at SB12 south of Escalante and headed back to our tiny house.  The roads we were on today (with the exception of Hell’s Backbone) didn’t have the spectacular scenery as some of the other areas we have been this week, but it was a great drive and we were glad we took the time to do it.  Also, winter had already set in up there so the leaves were off the trees and the grasses had all died so it is probably a much more beautiful area earlier in the fall.  Anyway, for us, it was another good day in the back country.

We were back at the house by 3:00 and after a brief break we did all the packing we could do today.  The evening was spent relaxing and snacking on the leftover food we have.  It will be sad to leave, we will miss our tiny house and the great time we have had in Escalante this week.  Tomorrow night we will be in Flagstaff, Arizona.