On to Sand Island...

As Road Trip Days Go, Southbound Day 8 was a Good One.

Every thing happened "just right" and the Big Bugga-Boo's didn't come to haunt our Halloween Weekend route.

The Capitol Reef to Hanksville portion has become considerably more endearing to us since we began studying the Life & Times of Port Pectol.

Hanksville is in A Whirled Unto Itself.  Perhaps that's why one of Hanksville's stalwart residents declared it The Center of The Universe.  Susun actually got to talk with The Creator of The Hanksville Universe today.  I opted out because I knew a male-to-male conversation about The Center of The Universe would go on for a few light years.

We needed to travel so we proceeded on.

We strayed in Hankville for over an hour before heading out to Hite.  The Road To Hite is pretty special in ways too detailed to describe here.  Suffice to say it's mesmerizing and even more so if you know the history of this area, especially David Rust's part of it. The Cass Hite part of it is pretty danged good, too!

When you finally get to the Hite Overlook, it's kind of like an epihany.  You stand there dumbstruck looking at everything there is to see.  It's overwhelming in a Good Old Fashioned Way.  The sweeping 360 panorama fills Your Heart & Spirit with Inspiration and much more, too.

From Hite to Blanding is a journey through plateaus, canyons, buttes, spires and many other features so typical of this area of the Colorado Plateau.  We will defer further discussion for a later post.

We prefer to steer far wide of Blanding so we only went into the south side of that community to buy gas and then turned around and beat feet for Bluff and Sand Island beyond.

Although we generally avoid Blanding, we have considerable personal history with San Juan County.  We once tried to buy a house in Monticello, the County Seat.  We put money down and signed all the papers.  It's a long story, of course.  We even had a Post Office Box in Monticello and a storage unit, too.

Sand Island is a BLM enclave beside The San Juan River.  It's Ground Zero for people rigging to run The San Juan--Grand Ma's River, as we have called it for nearly 40 years.

We have almost as much personal history on The San Juan as we do The Verde, The Salt or The Colorado.  We've spent huge gobs of time in Bluff and Sand Island and on The San Juan in all of its permutations and combinations.

Coming back to Sand Island is a lot like going to a Family or Fraternity Reunion of some sort.  You might not see the same people, but you sure see the same familiar faces of this place.

The San Juan never seems to change.  Sure, maybe the invasive tamarisk trees are a little bigger and more numerous but The River is The Same.  Hey, it's The San Juan and that's why river runners have been coming here for more decades than most of us know.

We will be pulling out of Sand Island on Sunday's Halloween Morning to head down deep into The Rez, as The Navajo Nation is often called.  We'll turn right and go out through Hopi Land before turning left and thence toward Little Colorado River Country at Winslow.

We're bound and determined to stay off infamous I-17 this trip.  We're coming back to Rimrock from Winslow with only four miles of I-17 time to return home.

While in Winslow, we hope to visit and photograph Peter Wolf Toth's Arizona Native statue.  We'll write more about Toth when we get back to a real computer hooked up to real internet.

As we close this Halloween Tome, we will leave you with a tantalizing thought. Did you know that Bluff, Utah, is joined at the metaphorical hip with Escalante, Utah??

Huh?  Say What? 'Tis true!

Now THAT's a long story and one we will tell when we comfortably back onlline at our Straw Home beside Montezuma Well National Monument.

Happy Halloween.  Happy Last Day of October!