Campfire Tales - December, 1997

UFO landing site
Muley Twist Canyon

by
Larry E Heck

Another of the many adventures of PASS PATROL

To get from Escalante to the east side of the Colorado River, members of the San Juan Mission lowered their wagons down Hole in the Rock and floated them across on a raft.  Doing that today would cause a fella more problems than setting off a fireworks display inside the tent.

The way we get to the other side these days is to drive up to Boulder and take the Burr Trail across Capitol Reef National Park.  Along the way, we often camp at the UFO landing site.  We know its a UFO landing site because the sign says so.  It is painted on the belly of a small plane that is nose dived into the sand.

Sundance, Sunshine, and I first happened onto it late one night in the spring of 1994.   It was the end of the day when I suddenly put on my turn signal and turned onto a dirt path heading west.

“Where you going?” Sunshine called on the C.B. radio.  The sun had gone down hours ago.

“Camping,” I answered.  One thing about the Wild, Wild, West.  Anytime you get tired of driving, all you have to do is get off the pavement on some dirt track across public land and you’ll find a campsite.

I reached an intersection in the path and slammed on the binders.  I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.  I keyed the mic.  “Boulder Airport and UFO Landing Site!”

“What did you say?” Sundance called.  He was still parked at the point where I turned off the highway.

“I said we’re gonna become an X-file tonight.”

The sign was made from the body of a light plane.  The words were written on the bottom of what used to be that plane.  The front end of the plane was buried in sand up to its wings as if it had nose-dived into that position and never moved.  The wings and wheels were gone and there was nothing inside.  I suppose the little green men took the pilot for experimental testing.

A short distance south of the sign was a BLM trailhead for a hiking trail across the original Boulder Mail Route.  There were about a dozen fire rings at that trailhead where others had spent the night, probably waiting for the UFOs to return.

“Look!” Sunshine called.  “I saw a colored light flickering over the desert to the north!”

“Sure you did,” I answered.  “Let’s set up the tents.”

“There’s another one!”

The three of us stood beside our vehicles and watched as flickering lights sporadically appeared and disappeared over the desert about a mile north of us.  About once every three minutes, another flickering light that lasted only a couple seconds, appeared in the distance, then it was gone.  That continued for about fifteen minutes.

“What was it?” Sunshine asked.

“Probably headlights of cars reflecting off something from somewhere.”

“Right,” Sundance remarked.  “We were on that road for an hour and haven’t seen a single vehicle.  Now you think there’s one going by every three minutes ... and they have colored headlights”

“Could be an interesting night,” I said with a cynical grin.

You can find the UFO Landing Site on your USGS 1:100,000 scale metric topographic map of Escalante, Utah.  Look for the landing strip southeast of Boulder Town off Highway 12 at the intersection for Hell’s Backbone.

UFO’s or not, a lot of stories came to life during the many times we camped at that site.

On one trip, Sunshine brought along a new gadget that was supposed to make perfect biscuits.  Well, I gotta admit, they looked okay on the top.  Problem was, the bottoms didn’t come out too good.  We used them to pound tent stakes in the ground.

As the story goes, the infamous Ranger Rick, the fella who is always about a day too late to catch us, was out there the next day and found one of the biscuits.  He bit into it and had to have several hundred dollars of dental work done.  That’s why he’s so mad at us.

Another story is that the Alien Brat keeps coming in while we’re asleep and throwing our chairs into the campfire.  That was the only reason we could think of when we got up one morning and found the charred remains of what used to be my chair.

Another story is that Sundance was abducted and that the Alien Brat is actually his illegitimate son.  Alien Brat pops up in about as many of our campfire tales as Ranger Rick.  If fact, according to several stories, Alien Brat has swooped down in his spaceship and rescued Outlaw and Sundance on rare occasions where Ranger Rick had them cornered.

The UFO landing site is a short distance south of Boulder and makes an excellent “up-and-at’um”, “giddy-up-go”, starting point for the trip across the Burr Trail.  The first time we went across the Burr Trail it was an unpaved gravel road.  In 1994, the county decided to pave it and suddenly found themselves as busy as a fella draining a swamp full of alligators.  Them alligators came at them from every direction armed to the teeth with lawyers, protestors, and anybody else who didn’t have anything better to do than fight the idea of paving a graded gravel road.  Somehow, that was supposed to have some kind of lasting environmental impact of destroying the area’s primitive nature.  I guess some folks who grow up in a city think a graded gravel road is primitive.

Well, those county fellas are used to negotiating with alligators so they only paved part of it.

The Burr Trail is a little more than sixty miles long and was originally laid out by a rancher named Johnomtlantic Burr.  He needed the trail to get sheep across country and cut the switchbacks in the Waterpocket Fold.  During the Uranium boom, miners widened the road to get vehicles through.  Today, those switchbacks are within Capitol Reef.

There are numerous side-trips off the Burr Trail.  We have traveled all the ones on the south side looking for an access road to the Hole in the Rock road.  There aren’t any.

We found a lot of scenic country and even a petrified forest during our travels, but there are no open roads across the Escalante River. 

We have not explored many of the roads on the north side of the Burr Trail, however, there is one short one that draws us in nearly every year.  It is within the boundaries of Capitol Reef National Park and contains fabulous double arches.  It’s on the same map as the UFO Landing Site and is designated by a dotted line.  Look in the upper right hand corner of the map where Capitol Reef National Park is written.  Look just above the work “National” and you’ll see it winding through Muley Twist Canyon off the Burr Trail just west of the Burr Trail Switchbacks.

The last time I was in Muley Twist, it was rocky and very narrow in places.  At the end of the road is a short hiking trail that overlooks Oyster Shell Reef.  That point is also a trailhead for backpackers going north.  A few months ago, I was parked at that trailhead having lunch when a backpacker came walking up the road.  He asked if I knew where the double arches were and I told him he walked right by them.  I gave him a ride back to the arches on my way out.

The road from Burr Trail Switchbacks to Bullfrog can be found on the 1:100,000 map for Hite Crossing.  It is true that nothing in this story requires 4WD, but I figured a nice scenic trail for our more timid readers would be a good follow-up to last months axle crusher.  Be sure to carry lots of food and water with you if you go.  Sixty miles is a long way to walk and there’s not a lot of traffic on the road.  Cellular service is available most of the way if you have a full 3 watt phone.

Happy Trails!

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