Part 3
May 6, 2020
I went for a short walk in the morning to try and find the source of the hot water, but the trail turned into a wet marshy area that I could not get through. We left camp at about 9 am and drove to Delta. Delta has the cheapest gas we have seen, so we topped off the gas tank.
From Delta we drove south on the Pahvant Valley Heritage Trail. This is an all-purpose trail, through the west desert, that starts in Delta and ends near Fillmore. The first stop was Fort Deseret, just south of Hinkley. There is not much there, but the ruins of the adobe fort walls from an 1800’s era fort the pioneers built.
We then drove through the Clear Lake Wildlife Refuse to the Lace Curtain rock formation on the north side of Pahvant Butte. This was pretty interesting and we spent some time looking at the rocks and walking through the area.
Our next stop was the Devil’s Kitchen Petroglyphs. We had a little trouble finding the place. We had GPS coordinates from the internet, but they were totally wrong. It appears everyone on the internet copied the wrong coordinates. However, we passed a county sign on the main road that pointed in the direction of the petroglyphs. There were a couple of miles on the ATV trails, and no more signs. We finally arrived at the site and was able to explore the rock formations and the petroglyphs. After eating lunch we drove back to the Clear Lake road.
Our next stop was the Meadow Hot Springs, however, there were a lot of people in the pools and more were arriving, so we decided not to get in the water. It was about 4 pm, so we drove to our planned campsite near the Tabernacle Hill Lava tubes. The last 3-4 miles were pretty rough, but we finally set up camp on the mesa in the middle of the lava flows. We started to relax and read, but not long after setting up camp, the wind started to blow. It was blowing pretty hard and the weather forecast predicted high winds until midnight. So we quickly packed up and drove back down the road a mile to a spot that was in a small valley. The wind was much calmer there, however, it still blew for most of the night.
May 7, 2020
We were up early and drove to the hot springs. We hoped there would be no one there, but to our surprise, there were 10-11 campers/RVs in the parking lot. The last time we stopped at these springs there were No Camping signs in the area, but I didn’t see any this time, so camping must be allowed.
Fortunately, most of the campers were still asleep or in their RVs. It was not too crowded and for a few minutes there were only 3 of us in the water.
After about an hour in the water we walked back to the van. Since we were driving on pavement the rest of the way home, I re-inflated the tires back to the highway pressure. We drove about 300 miles of dirt road for this trip. Nothing was too rough, and some of the roads were smooth enough to go 50-60 mph. But there were still a lot of areas of washboarded roads where it was nice to have a lower tire pressure.
Overall it was a nice spring trip through the west desert of Utah.