The Road

The Road

Attention: Beware of the Ephraim-Manti La Sal Forest Mountains…

I’m mainly kidding, but seriously – have I got the story for you…

So last weekend I decided to go on a camping trip with my two best friends - Scotty and Jordan Beckstead. We decided to go camping with a group of our friends for my dear friend Lindsey’s birthday. The directions we received were to head to Manti and turn at 500 South when we hit the “Manti La Sal Forest” sign. So, we headed to Manti with the GPS’ help and when we were in Ephraim, on 500 South we saw the sign that said “Manti La Sal Forest” – so we thought – “hey we better turn here.” Not only did we think that, the GPS was telling us to turn.

So, like the electronically addicted people that we are – we listened to the GPS. We started up the canyon and still had cell phone service. After 20 minutes, we decided to call the people we were meeting up with and make sure that we were supposed to be on a dirt road. They said, “yes” so we figured we were on the right path. Good thing, because cell phone service went out about 10 minutes later on all of our phones. When we were on the phone with our friends they told us to turn right at the reservoir and they were in campsite 1 so we figured we would be there in about 10 minutes.

About 30 minutes later…no cell phone service… we are literally on THE TOP of the mountain. We haven’t seen human life/camp sites in about 40 minutes. We finally come upon a sign at the top of the mountain that was very small… it said “to Manti and ‘Snow Lake.’” We were elated… celebrating that we hadn’t headed an hour in the wrong direction. So, even though we were on the top of a mountain with no one in site – we thought – “hey! Our friends are outdoorsy… they MUST be up here.” Man were we wrong…

While in celebration, we continue on the dirt road and after about 20 minutes we see a very, very small lake called “Snow Lake” with a glacier (nooo freaking joke) – a glacier next to it. This is when our instincts came in and we really started to think we were in trouble (the top of a mountain…glaciers…snow on July 31??)… BUT, instead of listening to our instincts, we decided to continue on the dirt road *why waste an hour and a half driving to the top of a mountain? There had to be SOME way out – riiight?* ; ) So… we continue on the dirt road and pass about three more lakes and five more glaciers.

At this point, I started to get nervous… and what better thing to do then joke around when you are nervous right? So I start to tease Jordan about horror movies (we both love them)… I started saying “Jordan… I think I just saw the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy over there and I think he had skin on his face.” And… “wow… this is turning out to be a Hills Have Eyes” night. It was really scaring him : )

We actually found out that the thing that I thought looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy was a tree… haha… so … after that we keep going for another 45 minutes on this dirt road. The road kept getting skinnier and skinnier. We had turned the GPS off an hour ago because we figured that the roads wouldn’t be updated, but we started to get scared so we turned it back on. Luckily it did have a path highlighted so we decided to follow the highlighted path. (We were pretty desperate at this point). The GPS took us to the sign we were hoping for – it said… “Manti Canyon – 17 miles this way…” – we celebrated again!!! We started heading back down the road and followed the GPS track – we had to trust it because it basically just saved our lives right??... so we follow the path, but we start getting to skinnier and skinnier roads… we were pretty sure we were on ATV trails, but the GPS hadn’t failed us up to this point, so we kept following it.

Pretty soon – the road started getting REALLY bumpy and skinny and the GPS was taking us off cliffs *literally* so we had to keep following this shady skinny path. We ended up going down a pretty big hill and at the bottom of the hill there as a huge lake-like puddle. We had hit a dead end… AGAIN… Again, our faith was torn down. So after Scott said “should we take it!!” and I said… “noooooo” (sometimes you have to bring men back to reality right??) we turned around and started going back up the hill.

The hill wasn’t as easy as we thought it was. Scott’s right tire got stuck in the mud/ditch on the way up and we thought the axle was going to break… we kept backing up and the ditch kept getting deeper. (Keep in mind that it had been two and a half hours before we have seen people at this point and it was pitch black outside [10:30 p.m.] – we were freaking out…) So finally Jordan pushed him out and Scott decided to try the hill one more time. We were scared because we didn’t want to have to get towed out of the mountains (plus – who would we contact? We didn’t have service). So he tried it again and we got up the hill.

Jordan just so happened to be flashing his flash light out of the car and we saw a glowing stick in the distance. We followed the glow-stick and ran into some hill-billy’s who finally lead us to the path out of the crazy mountains. We ended up at our friend’s campsite five minutes after being on the right road and had a great time on the rest of the camping trip,

But really….
Thank the lord we got out of there. It was scary.
Beware the Ephraim/Manti La Sal Mountains.


The funny thing is – I gave Jordan “The Road” movie for his birthday that day before we started driving up. Little did we know we would be ON “The Road” for the next five hours lost as can be….

This story is dedicated to my dearest Scotty and Jordan… We are lucky to be alive boys, but I am happy to have shared that adventure with you : ) <3