Zen and the art of Route Planning

Heading west from Moab towards the Pacific, the idea was to follow the "loneliest road in America", the US50, A.K.A. the backbone of America. It snakes its way across what would have been the orginal frontier of the Wild West through prospecting boom and bust towns, classic plains and mountain ranges emerging into suburban California.

Trying to buy 4,500 miles worth of American maps at a decent scale would be pretty expensive so specifying Sat Nav from Hertz was a bit of a no-brainer. However their "Neverlost" Sat Nav gadget is rubbish for wandering or exploring (and don't get me started on what I shudder to call its UI). It's only set up to get you from A to B by shortest or quickest route. It won't do 'vias', it won't do 'avoids' and really irritatingly, when you zoom out to get a wider picture of your area, it 'helpfully' removes all the smaller roads from the screen. This makes it really hard to ID interesting alternative routes.

This leads me to a Top Tip: Whilst you have an internet connection, abuse the 'Print Screen' button mercilessly. Before leaving Moab I screen-grabbed tons of Googlemaps of a likely looking route to my laptop. By putting the laptop into 'hibernate' mode and only powering up to view maps and get intermediate destinations, I can get at least 7 hours worth of life out of the battery. Plenty of time before the next civilisation stop and a/c power.

I knew I wanted to take a detour into Salt Lake City in order to sample the infamous Crown Burger of Man Vs Food Fame so I had to find an interesting non-freeway route North from the US50. My selection process for this kind of thing basically consists of 'What are the remotest, twistiest looking roads on the map'. I found them in spades.

Despite navigating sheep outside Orangeville and almost giving SatNav lady an aneurism with my refusal to go on sensible roads, I discovered that what looked like a road on the map was actually a 20 mile, 2 hour gravelled track winding through woods, alpine meadows and the skyline forest of Manti-La Sal. Maybe SatNav lady had a point (or maybe 'They' don't want us to see the world without going past at least one Generica outlet) but I learned that the American idea of what constitutes a road as opposed to a track is different to ours - and maybe that's why everyone drives a truck out here? Either way, awesome.

More pictures from my route North