Jeep Camping Adventure

Over the past few months, I've spent as much time as possible exploring the desert. It's stunning, vast, and can take your breath away around nearly every single corner. While exploring the desert may always be my favorite, nothing makes me feel more like being at home than being in the mountains. I grew up in a small mountain community surrounded by pine trees and aspen groves. It only takes a few days of not being in the mountains before I start to feel it. The draw is real and powerful. I typically push the mountain camping season on both ends. Starting too early, like my last adventure where the roads were still closed, or pushing late into the fall when it's bitter cold and the snow could start flying at any time. So when a window opens, even for just a quick trip, I have to jump. With just a little over 24 hours to explore, I wanted to head somewhere familiar but had places I hadn't explored yet. We made our way up Ephraim Canyon towards Miller's Flat Road, an area that I know really well. But from looking at the maps, I noticed several routes I've never taken, all of which look like they could be incredible. The drive up Ephraim Canyon and then down towards Joe's Valley Reservoir is vastly underrated. It's beautiful, lush, green, but a nice easy trail. It's Saturday morning and man we are just soaking up how beautiful the mountains are here right now. We barely got our tent set up last night before it was dark and the boys and I just had a nice evening around the campfire. Today we're going to do things a little bit different. In a lot of my adventures you can barely call what I do even camping because we're pulling in, just hurrying, setting things up, eating, going to bed, and then first thing in the morning breaking down, you know, our camp and jumping back in the rigs and spending the entire day out on the trail. Well today I want to spend some time in the mountains just enjoying this beautiful campsite and some things like that. So I'm going to be working with the boys on their fire building skills, kind of teaching them some techniques for shaving down wood and making kindling and different things like that, and just enjoying just this incredible grove of aspens that we're right, you know, camping next to. Then maybe after lunch or so then we'll go hit some really cool trails or I think they'll be really cool. I've never been on them. I've been in this area a bunch but there's some trails I've never explored and I want to go check those out as well so should be a really fun day. Well for breakfast today I'm doing something different. Normally I just whip up some breakfast sandwiches because I love a breakfast sandwich and they're easy but today we're gonna do some breakfast tacos. We've got sausage and eggs and cheese, sour cream, guacamole. Now the boys don't love eggs so I'm just gonna make some eggs for me. I like my eggs over easy even inside my breakfast tacos and you get a nice little runny yolk in there. Delicious. Should be really good. Man, really tough to beat this. Just got warm enough that I was able to ditch the long sleeve. Incredible breakfast and the view from where I'm sitting right now. You have to see this. So while you're getting your fire plug started what would be your best thing to help start a fire besides that right now? What do you think? Fuel. Yeah but what kind of fuel obviously? I don't know because there's a lot of fuels. What's our favorite one that burns so quick? Witch's hair. Witch's hair. Where would you get witch's hair? The witch's hair comes from dead pine trees I'm pretty sure. Yeah look back there. We don't need to go get it because the wood we have is pretty dry but you see all those dead pine trees back there? Yeah. Guarantee if you went over into there and you were just walking around in the forest over there you would find some trees that have fallen down or you would find some branches that have fallen off or some that are at your length to reach. Another one that's really good that I like to do is that you have this bark over here and the bark you're able to you can peel the bark and make little fine fibers just like you're making out of you know those fire plugs. Yeah so I'm there. Break it off of that branch. There you go. Let me give you another little thing I like to do. Grab one of those flatter pieces of bark over there. There you go. I'll put it down. Put those on top of it. That kind of gives you a nice little surface to work with and that bark probably once we get started that bark will burn pretty good. It's pretty dry. So I can just put it right here. Yep. Those fibers open. I gotta say you want to point maybe an inch or two above it. Just let the sparks fall on it. That one's all fired up. Jackson's reading a book. Wyatt's using the file to put some notches in this branch. I'm reading a book on my phone and Molly pup over here is just enjoying the shade. I should go grab my book. Oh good girl. She hears her name and she has to come to get some love. This is the way to camp huh? We need to relax a little more sometimes. This is feeling good. We just keep climbing and climbing. Up here there's definitely been a burn area. You can see on the right a lot of these trees have gone in a fire that must happen in the past couple of years. We just keep going up and up and I'm hoping this just leads out to a really beautiful scenic overlook as it is a dead end. We stopped up here for lunch. Absolutely incredible. We camped down in the valley down below this. We've just been climbing and climbing. We're up above 10,000 feet now and just so stunning. Check this view out. So I was cruising through here and I saw what looked like a headstone as I was going down this road and so I stopped backed up and took a look at it and it's actually not a headstone. It's marking where this pioneer family had a baby in October in 1879. There was a lodge here I guess. They stopped as they were coming over the mountains and had the baby stayed the next day and then left. Just so cool man. All of the pioneer history in Utah. It's absolutely incredible. Check this thing out. After stopping at the pioneer marker we made our way down and passed Joe's Valley Reservoir. The route I had planned was designed to drive further south and head back over the top of the mountains near Mayfield, Utah. However, the design route ran into an OHV with restricted trail so we opted to head back to Joe's Valley Reservoir and back over the top through Ephraim Canyon. I was a little worried that the glacier wouldn't be melted between Ephraim Canyon and Spring City Canyon and it is not. So the glacier is over the road and it's melting but I'll let it sit here for another month before you can actually complete look at this view. With daylight fading and bad weather rolling in we started to head home. If you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe. If you want to follow us on the day-to-day you can do so on Instagram at backroadexploration. Thanks for watching.