Fish Springs on Presidents Day Weekend

I know that I already went to Fish Springs with Randy on Martin Luther King Jr Day, but I had to take the Sequoia somewhere yesterday, and this seemed like a good choice.

You can get to Fish Springs from a few different directions (Wendover, Dugway, Delta, Tooele). I chose to go from the east end of the Pony Express Trail, which starts at Vernon (it actually starts in Missouri, but the marked Utah section starts here), south of Tooele. This is the first summit at 6,192 feet before the road drops into a valley. There is one more mountain pass before Fish Springs. The rest of the road is mostly flat desert valley.

The road from Dugway connects here (the Sequoia is actually on the Dugway road, but I didn't come from that direction).

Simpson Springs is a Pony Express stop. It has a rebuilt stone building, the remains of a farmer's building erected from the original Pony Express building, and a campground.

This is where the Powell guy supposedly took his boys camping in the middle of the night when his wife disappeared. Notice the yellow warning sign added to the bottom of the official sign.

There are too many people with guns and not enough rabbits in this desert.

After about 60 miles of dry dirt road (60 to 70 miles per hour over some straight stretches), I came to the Fish Springs refuge (this picture was taken facing east, even though I was traveling west on the road).

One of the many ponds at Fish Springs. A nice refuge in the middle of a very dry West Desert.

The birds seem to love it here.

This little guy's four buddies fled when I stopped to take a picture.

I left Fish Springs just before sunset.

These barren mountains are quite pretty at dusk.

Last time, Randy and I took a cutoff toward the Brush-Wellman Highway that was just a few miles east of Fish Springs. This time I decided to take a different cutoff even farther east called River Bottom Road, which led to the Weiss Highway. I was hoping Weiss Highway would end up on the Baker Hot Springs Road, but I really had no idea where it went. The sign said Delta was 40 miles, and I figured at the least I'd have to hit a paved road before too far.

River Bottom Road was the most boring road I've been on in a long time--hardly even any sage brush, and the mountains were quite a distance on the west and the east. That is, until I came to the lakes in the road. This is just a little puddle. I drove through lakes that shot waves of water 15 feet in the air on either side of the Sequoia.

Then I came to a stretch of mud that was about 1/4 mile long. I almost turned around but didn't want to go back through the lakes, so I plowed ahead. It was all I could do to hang onto the steering wheel and keep the Sequoia from ending up in the meadow. But the Sequoia kept going slower and slower and just about bogged to a complete stop when I found a relative dry spot and was able to pull out.

I finally reached the Weiss Highway, which turned out to be a dirt road just like the one I'd been driving on but without as much mud. The Weiss Highway went a few short miles to the Brush Highway, which is paved.

Yeah. I spent $11 at the car wash last night and still found a few trickles of mud here and there this morning.