Tag: Moab

We had spent most of the day grinding through 38 miles of Lockhart Basin Road, which connects Canyonlands National Park, to Moab. Some fifteen miles shy of Moab, we were ready to call it a day and get some rest, and we did so on the Colorado River, between Chicken Corners and Hurrah Pass. The next morning, we could not go on into Moab without checking-out Chicken Corners, and I am glad that we decided to make some time to do that. It is an easy trail, but with enough rock ledges and off-camber views 1,000-feet down to the Colorado River, that it is a really scenic and interesting drive. Chicken Corners is less than five miles long, so it is a quick drive. The “chicken” part comes at the end, where there is a narrow walking path along a 1,000-foot cliff, to the overlook area. Don’t be a chicken! This memorial to Joseph Hills Johnson sits near the beginning of Chicken Corners, and marks the spot where Johnson’s horse fell, “killing him instantly” according to a newspaper account. He is buried in Moab, at Grand Valley Cemetery on Sand Flats Road.

Lockhart Basin Road connects Canyonlands National Park to Moab and is a designated alternate expert section of the Utah Backcountry Discovery Route. This road was no joke. Lockhart Basin Road was my introduction to rock crawling. I thought that I had rock crawled in my Jeep before, but I was greatly mistaken. It is an amazing route, as you might imagine, since it runs along Canyonlands. It begins in Canylands as a nice, wide, graveled road that gradually becomes narrower as you wind your way up into the rocky canyons of Bears Ears National Monument. Towering red cliffs on the right, vast expanses of picturesque Canyonlands on the horizon, to the left. At some point, and it sneaks up on you quickly, the road turns into a series of boulder-strewn, narrow passages, that will make you wonder what you have gotten yourself into.