I left my abandoned campground, expecting that as I headed further south there would be less snow and warmer weather. That was not true, the weather stayed about the same temperature, and the snow cover got heavier as I approached Salt Lake City. How far south would I have to go to get out of the snow? But first, a stop to get a USA cell phone in Brigham City.
My current Canadian cell phone is usable down in the States, at “only” $9 per day to have access to everything my Canadian plan has, down in the USA. Telus even “generously” caps my roaming charges at $240 per month. My response to this is leave the data off on the Canadian phone, and get myself a burner phone for down here. I can certainly do better than $240 a month, even being restricted to brick and mortar stores as I don’t feel like trying to get a phone mailed to me down here. My research is pretty light, but I decide to go with Verizon as they have a reasonable $15GB plan for $45 a month. There is cheaper stuff, but often with gotchas, the biggest one being I can’t pay for it as a Canadian down here. Yep, America the land of free enterprise can’t be bothered to figure out how to take my Canadian credit card. The second gotcha is that many cheaper plans only come with a few gigs of data, and/or no hotspot data. I really don’t care about your $25 plan if it only has 2 gigs and I can’t buy more data at a reasonable price.
Snow in Brigham City – Verizon is on the opposite end of this parking lot
I’m sure I can improve upon my Verizon selection, next year having a phone in hand, but for now this will do. The other thing is if 15GB does not turn out to be enough (quite possible based on my experience), I can upgrade to unlimited for another $15 a month. But Verizon has it’s own gotchas – “unlimited” only applies to the cell phone. The hotspot is high speed for 5GB, then throttled down to 0.5Mbps, just enough to stream a low quality video.
So off I go into the Verizon store. I am not buying the cheapest phone in the store, nor the most expensive. While it would be nice to have another Pixel phone, they are just a little too pricey. I settle on a Motorola Moto G Power (2022). $270 is a little more than I’d like to pay but this gets me into the bottom end of the better more up to date phones. I add on setup, 64GB SD card (expanding phone space to 128GB), screen protector, case, USB fast charger plug, and a power bank, getting me to just over $500. I was not planning on buying the charger and power bank, but they had a deal – buy 5 accessories and get $50 off. So, another $40 fast charger and the $50 power bank was free. Sigh. They always get you in the end. I would have been better off going to Walmart across the street and picking up a burner phone I could use with Verizon, but that would have been more shopping I didn’t have time for. I still had to get south far enough to get out of the snow today, so Verizon wins this round in terms of who got the deal.
South of Fillmore was the most snow
I continue south through Salt Lake City. There is snow just above the city, and in places I can see little piles of snow even in town – the weather has been nasty here, although today is slowly clearing up and warming up just a little bit. I had been thinking about staying near Utah Lake again, but it is still too wintery here for me, I’m heading to St. George, where according to the forecast, above freezing nights are expected. That is what I want! But in the meanwhile as I drive south, the snow keeps getting thicker on the ground. It is a nice blue sky day as I stop for a rest, eyeing the snow like an unwanted house guest. I had expected to be out of the snow by now, but here I am half way to St. George and the snow is thicker than ever!
Seen from above, after I had moved
But as I drive south past Cedar City, the snow finally petered out to nothing. It had to end at some point, I know St. George had been too warm for snow on the ground. Good thing there is no snow, as my time in Brigham City between cell phone and grocery shopping had been way longer than I’d hoped. My long drive today was having me arrive in the dark, but only just! I had used FreeRoam to scout out a boondocking area just south of St. George. I turn off at Black Rock road, and can see the RVs camped in the almost dark. I don’t feel like scouting down dirt roads in the dark. Looking at the aerial of the place on the googles, I see a spot not far off the road just up Black Rock road going to what looks like a mine. Of course, I get there and find someone camped already in that spot. I had passed a bit of a road siding that I would only use as a last resort, but where I was sitting at the turn off to the occupied camping spot didn’t look too bad from what I could see in the dark. I maneuvered myself level enough off to the side of the turn off and call it a night.
First spot I found in the dark. Note near campers.
The morning revealed the Y junction I was in, just far enough off the main gravel road for me to not be rattled by passing night traffic. I could see the campers down the road. It was time to scout around a bit in the light and find a better spot. I was constrained a bit in my spots this time. The forecast for snow further north was going to be rain here, possibly as much as an inch. So, I was scouting for spots off of better roads on terra firma.
My second spot. The main gravel road is in front.
My selected spot ended up being down the road just off of the road siding. The spot is a little closer to the main gravel road than I’d like, but the access is firm, and the spot I’m parked on is firm too, and level. I had moved on a Saturday to this spot, come Monday at 3am I was glad I had moved, as the bulk hauling trucks started passing at that time. While they certainly woke me up the first time, you get used to the rumble building up and the passing pretty quick. The rain had made things wet for sure, there were areas that were soft and muddy. I found another spot a little further down the side road that would have been ideal, if a bit of a rough road. While it had not rained enough to make the road impassable, by this time I had grown used to the mining trucks passing in the night and was not going to move again.
Wide view of the boondocking, my rig is the tiny speck down the road past the first unit on the right.
I had been paying attention to the winter weather of the south western USA for some time and was aware that St. George was on the northern end of the warmer weather for the winter here. This was the first spot I considered to be ‘desert’. I could see why this part of the world this far north was warmer – I had dropped a couple of thousand feet down into this valley, which was an arm extending out from Las Vegas, a couple of hours southwest of me. If you are escaping the cold, St. George is about as far north as you can be in the desert and still have reasonably warm winter weather most of the time. I was certainly happy to have been subject to a day of rain rather than snow. Had the weather come in at night, it might have been snow still – the temperatures do fall below freezing here at night. But the days were warm enough to go about in a light jacket – good enough for me.
From here, you could go all the way to the Grand Canyon, many miles away
I was excited to get the Grom motorcycle out for my first desert ride. I rode up into the hills, but only so far that I could still walk back. You could have some good adventures in the back country here – take the right roads and you’ll end up at the Grand Canyon, many miles in from here. About the only disappointment was that the road past the mine was too rough to get an RV up here – but a good 4×4 camper could find some great spots for sure!
As far as I went, Motorola phone pic
I looked down the road, tempted to go further, but age and sense stopped me. Perhaps I will throw together a backpack and try some short adventures someday. I do still have a sleeping bag in the RV… I was also playing with my new phone camera, which was surprisingly good. Nothing wrong with the picture showing how far I went, is there? While the camera is better than I expected, the phone certainly feels lower-middle range. It is slow and pauses at times, or just doesn’t respond. Motorola has it’s own stupid apps, but doesn’t get in the way of Android too much, unlike Samsung phones. I can live with it.
He crossed the cart path in front of me giving me lots of time to get out my camera and get a picture
I was thrilled to see my first tarantula, who did not seem to be too concerned I was following it off the road with my camera. Good thing, as it took me a minute to get my camera out. I only got the picture just as the tarantula made it to some vegetative cover. Looks like this one has been in a battle or two – the left side is missing a leg.
Left in the camp up towards the hill
In terms of other things, I ran into another case of strange things left behind in a camp, in this case a toy(?) elephant. It looks pretty elaborate for a toy, more like an Indian style figurine. But the camp it was in is nice, just a little close to another “camp” that was in use. I put that in quotes as I wasn’t sure they were even there, rather long term parking a truck and trailer instead. There is garbage in some of the camps but the little hill closest to my camp had the most garbage, including quite the collection of glass strewn on the hill.
I’m not exactly sure what they mine here, gypsum perhaps. But there are two mines, the one down the road from where I am camped, and one on the other side of the Interstate 15 where I came in. You can take a side road and climb up to a good view of this mine. I had not expected the view, I was actually scouting with the motorcycle at the time for boondocking. The googles aerial does not show hills so well, what looked like a reasonable road to a spot was a tough climb, even with the bike. 
So I found no good boondocking on the other side of the I15, but at least got some good views and saw some nice scenery going into the back country a bit towards the Virgin River on that side of the highway.
My last day had me walking up to climb one more hill in the area. I arrive at the top to a large rock spiral, with a rock dedicated to Toni, 1984-2022 : too short a life in this world. I added one rock to the end of the spiral in solidarity. Tomorrow I would go onto new destinations further south, to see what I can while I can. See you then!
