Are we going to die here?! (Porcupine Rim, Utah)

Last fall, my partner and I packed our apartments into a storage unit, bought a used pop-up camper, and took off on a two-month road trip across the country. One of our most highly anticipated stops was a long weekend camping and hiking with my brother, his girlfriend, and my oldest childhood friend in Moab, Utah.

My brother had camped in Moab previously, and we looked to him for advice on where we should camp. His answer was immediate – Porcupine Rim campground in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. The problem was that Porcupine Rim was 45 minutes outside of Moab, and even further from the crown jewel attractions of the area, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Worse, the road to Porcupine Rim was an unpaved drive up the side of a mountain. We were nervous that our little Subaru pulling a rinky-dink camper would not make the trek. The car slowed down and revved its engine while pulling its burden uphill on a highway, let alone an unpaved slog up a mountain.

But my brother was stubborn and adamant, refusing to recommend camping elsewhere. When we looked up info on the campground, we could see why – it was stunning. We waffled.

The morning we left for Moab, we were still undecided. My partner and I were arriving early to secure a camping spot so the decision was up to us. For the entire drive we debated the risk of trying to reach Porcupine Rim. Finally, with an hour or so left until we reached town, we said “to hell with it, let’s try it.” We agreed that we would turn around and find another site if the drive got too tough for our vehicle.
I changed our Google Maps destination from Moab to Porcupine Rim, and I was surprised to see that it directed us to take a back way to the campground, rather than through Moab as I expected. The route saved us about half an hour due to traffic getting into town. This posed a slight problem, though, because we were planning on filling up our water jug in Moab before ascending. At the same time, we were already running a little late and wanted to be fully set up before sunset, so time was of the essence. We decided we would go follow Google Maps up the back way, set up camp, and then descend again to town to get water and food for the weekend.

We turned off the highway onto a well-paved two-lane state road that wound through low desert scrub. The drive was gorgeous. The sun was getting lower in the sky, casting a warm light over the valley. In the distance, the plain ended abruptly with massive red rocks jutting into the sky. It resembled a scene from Mars.
At the far end of the valley we passed a sign indicating that we were entering Manti-La Sal National Forest. Beyond it, the road wound upwards into the mountains and disappeared from view. The moment of truth, we thought.

But to our surprise and delight, the road remained paved as we ascended. We cruised along the edge of the mountain overlooking miles of golden hour desert below, the only car for miles around. Perhaps, we thought, the back way was better paved than the road from Moab was.

Ahh, what sweet naïve children we were.

We reached the elevation of the campground with an hour left until sunset. Google finally told us to turn off the paved road onto a flat dirt road, indicating that we had 10 minutes until we reached the campground. We looked at each other and made our decision. We had driven the camper on flat dirt roads for longer than 10 minutes before. We could do this, we thought. We were going to Porcupine Rim!
We bounced forward for a few minutes as expected. After a while, we noticed that the “road” had become two dirt tire tracks with grasses growing between them. A few minutes later, and the road began to narrow noticeably, so that there was barely any space between the side of the car and the trees. We had been driving for at least 15 minutes, and Google maps was still giving us a 9-minute ETA.
Suddenly, and I don’t know how it happened without us noticing, we were in a very sticky situation. The road was too narrow to turn around with a trailer and the further we went the more disused and suspicious the “road” seemed to be. We were nervous, but unfortunately there was only one thing we could do: keep going.
Soon we started to hear the screech of tree branches scraping along the side of the Subaru. I began to panic about the damage we were doing to my partner’s car, but he seemed unconcerned, his priorities in better shape than mine. The road – more like a trail now – was increasingly sprinkled with large rocks that made it difficult to maneuver the tires through. We started to become testy and panicky, unsure of how to proceed. In an attempt to get a better view of the road directly in front of us, my partner rolled down his window to peer around the hood. A few seconds later, though, I heard a FWAP and “ARGH FUCK OUCH” as a branch sprung through the window and caught him on the face, missing his eye by just half an inch. He was bleeding.

I scrambled to help, grabbing our first aid kit and handing him an alcohol wipe. He put the car in park and we stopped and stared at each other for a moment, breathing hard. We’d now been driving for over half an hour since leaving the paved road and the sun was getting low in the sky. We didn’t have any water. It was now later than we wanted to be setting up camp, let alone stuck on a mysterious forest trail with no exit in sight. Neither of us felt certain that this path we were following would come out at the campground, and there was no physical way we could turn back with our camper. Google Maps still showed a 7-minute ETA.
We were silent for a minute. Then I said, “Absolute worst-case scenario, we can unhook the camper, leave it here, and drive back out the way we came.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” he said, and sighed. We decided to keep moving forward until sunset – 30 minutes away – before we made the call to dump the camper.

Shortly thereafter, we descended a small hill and found at the bottom a worn and rusted wire cowgate. I had to get out of the car and lift up the gate for us to continue through. A few minutes later we faced another obstacle: a steep mound ahead of us. I looked at it doubtfully, but Michael was confident. He accelerated up the mound quickly and then stalled, so that the car sat on top while the camper hung at a terrifying angle down the other side; then, in one swift motion, pulled the car down and to the left, getting us over the mound without bottoming out at all.
I began applauding this despite myself, appreciating the feat. My congratulations caught in my throat as I laid eyes on the land ahead of us. There on the ground, illuminated in a golden pool of sunlight, was a full cow skeleton, picked clean and bleached white from the sun.

“What…the hell.” I said. “When was the last time somebody USED this road?”

Michael shook his head and drove quietly onward – we had 10 minutes left until sunset. We thought: Are we going to die here?

And then, as if we hadn’t spent the last hour in sheer panic and hell, the road started to open up before us. The trees stopped scraping the sides of the car and the ground smoothed out. I could see on Google, which read a 4-minute ETA, that we were very close to the campground.

As the sun sank beyond the horizon, we came into view of another road beneath us, wide and well-used. Though it was also unpaved, it was a superhighway compared to the path we had been following. That was the road my brother had taken, the road from Moab to the campground. We were almost there.
But there was one final test between us and (relative) safety: an 8-foot drop to the road down a terribly steep and uneven slope. Michael got out of the car and peered at the decline. I watched as he did some sort of mental geometry and then tugged a huge rock over a few feet.

“Gonna need that for my tires to roll over,” he said, and got back in and pulled forward. Our teeth rattled in our heads and the camper rattled in its hitch as he bounced us down the slope. Then, as suddenly as we got into trouble, we were out of it. I turned back to look at where we had just exited in shock and disbelief. There to the side of the path we had just driven, worn from sun and rain and partially hidden beneath overgrowth, was a small sign that said “Road Closed.” I groaned and cursed the Google overlords and nearly wept with frustration and relief.
When we pulled into the campground a few minutes later it felt like years since we had last seen signs of society. We hunted around for a spot, our moods tanking as we realized that the campground was nearly full. There were a few remaining spots in extremely undesirable locations, negating the purpose of our near-death experience to reach this idyllic campground. In our desperation we kept driving around and looking (and even got into an illogical argument with another group about whether it was appropriate for us to set up our camper between their two tents, about 50 feet apart.)

To be fair, we were in the wrong. But we were exhausted, anxious, and horrified that we may have risked our lives for a viewless camping spot by a pit toilet. We were ready to do anything to justify our day.

The strangers held their ground, and we gave up, retreating to the pit toilet spot dejected — until – wait. What was that? It doesn’t look like an official spot but — there’s an old fire ring — plenty of people have definitely camped here — could we? Should we?

Yes!

We pulled in and stepped out of the car to pitch darkness. There was no moon and we couldn’t see five feet beyond our camper, but we could tell from the way the nearby telephone lines disappeared downward into the emptiness that we were at the edge of a cliff. We popped up the camper in blistering wind that made the process 3 times as long as it would normally take. By the time we collapsed on our beds, it was almost 9 pm – and we still didn’t have any water. We groaned at the idea of driving back down the mountain 45 minutes to fill up our jug.

But luckily my childhood friend came to the rescue, pulling up to the site an hour later with several jugs of water and – mercifully – a case of Modelo. We still weren’t sure if the whole thing was worth it, but we were done, safe, fed, watered, and beered, and in that moment, nothing else mattered.

The next morning we awoke to a view that blew every campground we had ever been to (and all the ones we’ve been to since) out of the water. Five feet in front of our camper door the world fell away into Castle Valley, the nearly empty plain we had driven through the day before. From where I lay in bed I could stare out at long desert horizons and dramatic red rock formations. We drank our coffee and watched as the sun rose over the valley and the striations in the rock changed color with the shifting light.

When my brother arrived later that day he was horrified to see the long scratches covering every inch of my partner’s car, and apologized profusely that his campground suggestion had led to that. But we were over it. The pinstripes were just proof that the little Subaru and old camper could hold their own, and he was right about Porcupine Rim: the view our lives looked out on for the next three days was absolutely worth the drive.