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.

Somber geographic names aside, this is gorgeous red sand desert, and pretty fair grazing range, though much of the obvious cover is greasewood and salt brush.  It's named for famed Utah rancher John Atlantic Burr, who ran cattle here in winter, running them up the steep Burr Trail at Capitol Reef to high pastures on Boulder Mountain for the summer.  The huge desert is under the administration of the Bureau of Land Management, though there's really not a lot of management going on.  As I said, almost no one wanders into this desert.

The Henry Mountains, which rise over 11,000' above the western side of the desert, were the last mountain range in the lower 48 states to be placed on the maps.  Before John Wesley Powell named them, they were referred to as "the Unknown Mountains."  The Navajo still call them "Dził Bizhiʼ Ádiní," or the "Mountains Whose Name is Missing."  The Henry Mountains are home to a free-ranging herd of bison.

We happened on the Burr Desert in 2008 by chance.  We had been hiking around Natural Bridges National Monument and took off that afternoon, figuring we might camp at the NPS campground at Hite Crossing that evening.  When we arrived at Hite, we thought we'd ended up at Hell on earth.  What a bleak and dismal place, not one we'd want to spend an hour visiting, much less a night.  We continued up Highway 95 towards Hanksville, deciding we'd pull off the road and camp.  About an hour north of Hite we veered onto a dirt track to the right, and found a campsite on a hillside.  We slept under the stars that night: shooting stars, as it turned out to be the night of the Perseids!  There wasn't a single light in sight, and we could see nearly sixty miles from our campsite.  We were tent campers then, but this time, we just rigged a tarp and slept on cots, enjoying the gentle night breeze.

Morning in the desert.  Moonbeams won't get up until I have her tea ready.

A few years later, we returned with our first little a-frame camper.  Somehow, in that vast open land, we found the exact spot we'd stayed in before, even discovering a titanium tent peg we've left behind.  There was no evidence anyone had been on the spot since our last visit.  It was a warm summer night and we thought of sleeping out under the stars again, but a small rattlesnake kept gave Moonbeams the spook so we slept inside.

Back with our first camper, same spot.  In the distance, the Little Rockies at left, and the Henry Mountains at right.

The next day we unhtiched the camper and drove east to the end of the road at Burr Point which overlooks the Grand Canyon of the Dirty Devil River.  Be warned, the "roads" in the Burr Desert are mere tracks, crossed by frequent washes and often jumbled with rocks.  We jostled along for over half an hour, Moonbeams sitting there very quietly with a most unpleasant look on her face. 

The road got worse; we passed an abandoned corral and a failed cattle pond at one point, but no other signs of human intrusion.  Finally, in late morning, we came to the brink of a thousand foot deep chasm: the Grand Canyon of the Dirty Devil River.  It was magnificent!  One could barely make out the small serpentine river far below.  There was no sign anyone had been there for months.

Moonbeams then told me I had better be glad the site was so phenomenal as she was ready to leave me under a sagebrush if it wasn't worth the drive.  As it is, I suppose we were fortunate to get out safely. There is no cell service in the desert, and we didn't have a satellite phone or an emergency locator beacon, no winch on the truck, and our shade shelter was our camper left back on the knoll near the entrance.  After another 45 minutes or so, we were back at the camper, hitched up, and were out of the desert by lunch.

A small bit of the Grand Canyon of the Dirty Devil.

We've been back again; this is one of those landscapes you either find wonderful or repelling.  We lean towards the former, though the challenging nature of the terrain and the vast emptiness is a part of the draw.

On our last trip to the Burr Desert, 2014

View from our campsite