Chasing ghosts in Phantom Canyon

About an hour south of Colorado Springs, on the Bureau of Land Management’s Gold Belt Tour Scenic and Historic Byway, is the vertiginous red-walled Phantom Canyon.  It supposedly takes its name from an 1890s sighting of a man in a prison uniform walking along the railroad tracks that once made its way through the ravine.  The passengers who spotted him claim he was executed at the Colorado State Penitentiary a few days before.

The road follows the old F&CC RR railbed through Phantom Canyon.

The long and level sands stretch far away

One of our favorite places on Earth is Utah's little known Burr Desert.  This wild 900,000-acre expanse, nestled between the rarely visited lonely Henry Mountain Range and the even more remote Little Rockies on the west and the Dirty Devil River on the east is lovely country and almost completely empty.  Cars and RVs drive right by on US 95 all day, rushing from Hite Crossing in Glen Canyon NRA to the south to Capitol Reef NP to the west, never knowing what they're missing just to the east.  Maybe they are deterred by the foreboding names on the map like Poison Spring Canyon, Death Canyon or Hell Hole Swale.

 A BLM road in the Burr Desert.

Sublime Beauty at the Snake River Headwaters

For most travelers, the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway is just a highway between Yellowstone National Park's South Entrance and Grand Teton National Park.  There a few scenic pulloffs and unpaved access roads into the Bridger-Teton and Targhee national forests, but few visitors tarry as they focused on the well-known destinations in the two national parks.

But tucked off a gravel Grassy Lake Road on the west side of the parkway, a few miles beyond the Flagg Ranch concessionaire campground and cabins, are twenty rustic, first-come, first-served campsites, many of which are sited on a terrace just above the young Snake River which rises just a few miles northeast.  The sites are free and open until the road is closed by heavy snow.  Each has a fire ring, picnic table, bear boxes and bear-proof trash containers, and each cluster has a modern design vault toilet.