The Full Send Adventure Day 3 - Monticello to Beef Basin

[open_circuit]

We awoke to grazing (and mooing) cows at our campsite in the forest west of Monticello. Another brisk morning was made better with some camp stove percolator coffee and tea while we rushed to pack up camp to make our 9 am meeting with Matt in Monticello. We reached the meetup spot with time to spare and found Matt just before 9. From here we headed north on 191 then west on 211 towards Needles district. We stopped at Newspaper Rock briefly, then continued on 211 to the turnoff for 107, Beef Basin Rd.

At the turnoff we all aired down, the first time for all of us but Ty. Prepped for the trail, we continued along 107 past Bridger Jack Mesa to the Big Pocket Arch overlook loop. This loop was our first proper wheeling and rock crawling segment of the week. This trail leads out to Cathedral Point and overlooks several arches and broad canyon vistas. The trail is narrow and windy in some places with many moderate rocky sections that keep you in low gear and moving carefully along the rim of the canyon. I highly recommend this spur if you are in the area. We found several attractive established dispersed camp sites along this loop.

After completing the Pocket Arch overlook loop, the road continued up into the northern portion of the forest we had camped in the previous night. Here we realized it may have been possible (advisable, even?) to have continued through the forest to reach this section of trail instead of taking 191 and 211. This is something to consider for future travels in this area. In the forest, we turned north onto MVUM marked route 0093 (from marked route 0088) to descend into Beef Basin. Along this route we stopped for lunch, then explored a small loop to the south west of the main road where we found a remote campsite for the evening.

We set up camp around 4pm, earlier than any other day of this trip. We used the extra time to drive each other's rigs for a bit and see what it's like to be in something different. Shane and I swapped LJ and Rover to run some rocky sections and had some fun comparing for a while back at camp.

We camped along a small ledge overlooking a broad canyon. Temperatures were much warmer here than the previous two nights in the forest, but we were also camping at over 9000 ft the previous nights and this site was closer to 6000 ft. We enjoyed our first hot meal together as a full crew.

[RockyMtRebel]

Very fun day as Trent mentioned in his great trip report. Beef basin roads are very sandy and we got moving pretty good in this section as it was smooth and fun. There is a network of trails in Beef basin but we ended up camping in a very quiet section in the northwestern section of Beef basin. It was a very quiet and starry night with no signs of anyone else nearby.
This was my first night camping with the group.

https://youtu.be/dUGdEga89UE

[speedkills]

The views on this day were great, I loved how in the middle of this desert terrain I kept seeing trees and deadwood that reminded me of being on the beach. Like the forest cows, it was so unexpected to me that it just made me smile. This was the first warm night too, I ended up borrowing some wire from Ty and hooking up a fan I brought to my aux batteries so I could sleep under a fan all night and it was glorious. This was definitely the mod of the trip for me and will be a permanent camping companion going forward on hot nights. Sitting on the rocks just looking out over the valley was definitely the highlight of the day for me.