Back to Utah Heading South

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The winter storm that passed through this part of Idaho left some snow on the nearby mountains but by staying one extra night, we were able to leave on a sunny Tuesday morning. The roads were clear and even dry as we headed back to the Salt Lake City area. It was clear that SLC had received even more snow based on how low the snow line was on the mountains east of town. I suspect that some of the trails we hiked just a couple weeks ago were now snow covered and slick. We had about a 170 mile drive from Almo Idaho to the Bountiful Utah Elks Lodge. We are expecting this to be the last travel day where we are forced to drive separately.

We will be taking the new Jeep into Pards on Thursday morning to have it setup for flat towing behind the motorhome. Pards is about 9 miles south of SLC and Bountiful is about the same distance to the north. The lodge only has 2 RV sites with electric and water as well as a dump station. We are hoping there will be a spot open when we arrive so we can make our plan work. We pulled in to find one fifth wheel in one of the spots but the other was open. As we were plugging into the power pedestal, another small motorhome pulled into the lot, saw both spots were occupied and headed out. I guess we timed that pretty well. The Bountiful lodge isn’t very active, so we never saw it open so we simply put our camping check in an envelope and placed it in their mailbox. The lodge worked out fine although it is right along a rather busy street so there was almost constant traffic noise. Good thing it was cold and all our windows were closed.

SLC has a pretty reasonable public transportation system with buses and light rail service that extends well south and north of town. We investigated where the train stops are and have a strategy. Drop the car off Thursday morning, walk a mile or so to the train stop, take the train north to the Bountiful station and walk another mile back to the motorhome at the lodge. We could have included some bus rides but the walks were short enough that it wasn’t worth the time and effort to figure out the bus system too. They will make all the modifications to the Jeep on Thursday and we will bring the motorhome in on Friday morning so they can install the other half of the braking system since it needs to tie into the air brakes.

A bit of a primer on flat towing a vehicle - sometimes called towing 4 down. For this type of towing, the vehicle rides on all four of its wheels without the need for a trailer or tow dolly. First off, the car to be towed must be capable of being transported this way. Fewer and fewer cars are being identified by the manufacturers as being flat towable. Back in 2012, a publication that summarizes which vehicles will work had about 51 different models in their listing. In 2022, that number is down to just 34. A decade ago, several Subarus and Hondas were able to be towed and were rather popular choices but neither of these manufacturers have a model that works today. Plus there is an additional criteria that some models that can be towed must have a specific transmission. For instance, the Grand Cherokee we bought can be flat towed but many of the lower end models of Grand Cherokees cannot.

Once you have a car that can be flat towed, it must be setup to do so. This involves a few components be installed on the car. On our 2014 Jeep Cherokee, I had a friend help me do the work in my garage where I had practically all the tools required to do the job. I simply ordered all the parts and we went to work. It took us two days to complete but it wasn’t too bad other than the fact that you must disassemble a large portion of the front of the car! Now that we’re on the road, my toolbox has some important things but is not nearly adequate to handle such a large undertaking. Plus my friend is back in Rochester. This is why we had to seek out professional help.

There are three main component systems that must be installed. First, a base plate that will firmly attach to the front of the car and provide connection points for a tow bar that is mounted in the towing vehicle’s receiver. Second, some sort of braking system. There are many options. On our first setup, I used one from NSA Products called the Ready Brute. It worked great since our first motorhome was a gas rig and didn’t have air brakes. Now that we have a diesel pusher with air brakes, the best braking system is the Demco Air Force One. This will tie into the motorhome’s braking system and supply air to a controller that in turns applies the Jeep’s brakes. The third system required is an electrical connection that will feed signals from the motorhome to the Jeep for lights, turn signals and brake lights as well as a trickle charge so the Jeep’s battery doesn’t go dead while towing.

Here is a picture of the front of our Jeep after the install. The red tow hooks are part of the Trailhawk model and don’t have any association with flat towing so those can be ignored. Just inboard of the tow hooks, circled in white, are the mounting points of the base plate where the tow bar connects. The two items circled in green are connections for the braking system. The lower one is where an air line from the motorhome connects. The upper green one is an emergency break away switch that if for some unforeseen reason something breaks and the Jeep goes off on its own, a cable will pull the pin out of the switch and apply the brakes bringing the Jeep to a stop. Let’s hope we don’t experience that nightmare scenario! The lower red circled item is the connection for an electrical umbilical feeding the Jeep signals for turn signals etc. The second red circled item is a two wire connector to feed a 12 volt trickle charge to the Jeep.

Front of Jeep Showing Flat Towing Connections

Bright and early Thursday morning, we headed to Pards and dropped the car off. We walk a mile or so north to the Murray Central station. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out how to get tickets from the kiosk to get us from here to where we needed to go near Bountiful. The trick was knowing which set of tracks to stand next to. There are several rail lines and two sets of tracks at this station. One is more of a local rail line that has numerous stops and goes all over the city. We wanted the other line called the FrontRunner which is more of a long distance line that goes all the way from Provo in the south to Ogden in the north which covers about an 80 mile distance. We only needed to go three stops to the north. We had about a 20 minute wait before our train arrived and it looked to be what we wanted and it was definitely heading north so we boarded. The train cars were fairly nice with two levels of seats. There was room for bikes and strollers and even Wi-Fi available. It only took about 30 minutes to get to our stop at Wood Cross station. It was a little bit longer walk but we got back to the lodge and settled in.

Our FrontRunner Train Car

We were expecting a call from Pards late in the afternoon telling us the car was done and what time we should come in with the motorhome. When we didn’t hear from them, I was a little nervous and called before they close at 5 PM. It turns out that our 2022 Grand Cherokee is a new model that they had never worked on before. They assured me they had the right parts and we’re not running into any issues other than it was different enough to slow down their progress. They were going to stay late and try to get it done yet that evening. When I called Friday morning, they needed just another hour to finish up. This actually worked out fine since heading there at 10 AM meant I wouldn’t need to drive the motorhome thru SLC during morning rush hour.

It was going to take until mid afternoon to make the modifications to the motorhome so we grabbed the Jeep and headed out to do a little bit of sightseeing. We didn’t want to go too far or try a long hike in case we received a call from the shop. We used a few of the highly favorited geocaches on the southeast side of SLC as a guide and headed to Sugar House Park and Tanner Park. The later had a very large off-leash dog park. We kind of felt out of place as we did the 1/2 mile hike to one of the older caches in the area. Everybody else had at least one dog with them and the other dogs really seemed to be enjoying themselves. Next we headed out for lunch and then to the Wheeler Historic Farm since it was only a couple miles from Pards. It was a beautiful fall day and there were a fair number up people out enjoying the weather, old farm buildings and the animals. As we walked around, I got the deja vu feeling like we have been here before. I vaguely remembered finding a geocache here but couldn’t remember the details until I looked at a map of our past finds. Sure enough, we were here in June of 2017. Since it had been more than 5 years ago and it was a beautiful setting, we didn’t mind walking around to see some of the sights again.

View at Tanner Park

Mountain View at Wheeler Farm

Large Barn

Double Stuff Oreo Cow?

Intricate Chainsaw Carving

Since it was late afternoon by this point, we headed back to the shop even though we hadn’t received a call yet. We needed to wait 45 minutes before they said we should pull the car around and they would finish the towing setup by actually connecting the car to the motorhome with our new tow bar. We quickly discovered that this car sits several inches higher than the receiver on the back of the rig. We needed to get a riser block that would make up the difference. I hoped they would have what we needed but instead of having a selection of different sizes, this shop takes measurements and fabricates it on the spot. We went through all the connections and had the air braking system get a final adjustment with the vehicles attached.

Chris had investigated what needs to be done for our Grand Cherokee to be switched into flat towing mode. She had found an excellent resource with the same model who had done all sorts of research about some of the problems others have had when first setting up their new car. It turns out that this car has many safety gizmos which are great for normal driving of the car but pose a bit of a problem when flat towing. Apparently the biggest issue is with the electric emergency brake getting activated either before pulling out after connecting the vehicles or worse, having that happen along your route. Our rig has enough power that I likely wouldn’t notice if the Jeep’s wheels were locked up and being dragged until our tire pressure monitoring system detected high temperatures of the tires or we smelled burning rubber. She had made a step by step list of instructions on how to configure the various safety menu items before we pull out. We had practiced this a few weeks earlier just to make sure we knew what to do but it wasn’t until now that we could put it to the test.

The sun was just setting as we finalized everything and went in to pay. It wasn’t a cheap bill - a little over $4800 plus tax. But parts were about 75% of the total so the cost for installation was not quite $1200. Pards did a very nice job with the install and didn’t charge us more than they quoted when the install took much longer than they originally expected. I suspect when the next new model Jeep Grand Cherokee comes in, they will have adjusted the install price to account for the added complexity.

We pulled out with just a little bit of daylight left. Generally we don’t travel with the motorhome in the dark since it will mean we are needing to setup camp in the dark. It also didn’t help that it was rush hour on a Friday so traffic was horrible. Our plan was to drive the 40 miles south from Pards back to the Provo Elks Lodge. We had stayed there about 3 weeks ago for one night on our way to purchase the Jeep. This time we were hoping to stay a few nights since there seemed to be a lot to see and do in this area. We pulled into the lodge’s parking lot only to find all 5 of the sites with electric were already occupied. That meant we had to take one of the dry camping sites and run the generator. We headed into the lodge to fill out the paperwork and pay for our site and we ended up sitting and talking with several of the lodge members for 90 minutes while having a couple beers.

Provo Elks Sign at Night

It wasn’t clear whether any of the 5 traveling Elks were expecting to leave the next morning. If so we likely would have simply moved to their vacated spot and spend a few days in Provo. So we instead started to make some plans further south in Utah and continue toward St George which is about 250 miles from Provo. We picked a small private campground in the town of Nephi to spend 2 nights. It would get us to about 200 miles from St George and would allow us to find some geocaches in a couple of Utah counties nearby that we had not yet cached in.

Since it was a short drive on Saturday morning from Provo, we got in relatively early and I had the chance to go get a cache in one of the counties we needed. The view from the cache site was nice with a frosting of snow on the nearby mountains and it looked like this area might have other things to see and do if we just investigate a bit.

View from Geocache

That first evening while at High Country RV Park we started to look for things to see or do in the area and stumbled upon the Mount Nebo Scenic Byway. It is a 38 mile road that goes between Nephi and Payson Utah. From the pictures we saw, it looked like a very beautiful drive. It started just 7 miles from camp and we could turn it into a 70 mile loop by taking Interstate 15 from Payson back south to camp. There are quite a few trails listed along the drive as well as numerous geocaches. We knew there were more activities that we could fit into one day so we would need to be judicious about which stops we pick if we want to be back by dark. It looked like it was a paved road for the complete scenic drive but the info we found did say it is closed in winter. Unfortunately we couldn’t find if that meant it was closed between two specific dates or if it gets closed based on actual snow levels. We couldn’t find any real-time info about it being closed so we headed out for a day of fun.

We had a beautiful clear, sunny day for the drive so weather was looking great. We had gotten below freezing overnight but it was supposed to get into the low 50’s during the afternoon. We made a few stops early in the drive to do some short hikes to geocaches and got to take in some of the wonderful views of the snow capped mountains. One of them is Mount Nebo, the highest peak in the Wasatch Range but it was never perfectly clear which one it was.

View Along Scenic Drive

We were only about five miles into the scenic drive but we had already gained 1500 feet in elevation when we came upon our first snow at a geocache along the road. At the 9 mile point is a pullout for the Devil’s Kitchen. We had even more snow at this point and one of the nearby caches was covered in a few inches of the white stuff. It had been a long time since we had to find a cache in the snow but years of living in western New York had developed our skills enough that we remembered how to do it. Devil’s Kitchen is touted as a mini Bryce Canyon. It does have a lot of similarities to that national park, but the emphasis should be on the mini since the view was just over a very small part of a hill.

Devil's Kitchen View

Another Mountain View

As we proceeded the snow levels kept increasing. Initially the road was mostly clear and dry with just a few patch’s of snow that had drifted. We stopped at another viewpoint for a geocache but this one was near a fence line with 10 inches of snow and we had not bothered to bring gloves along. We didn’t last long until our fingers were numb. There weren’t many other people up here which turned out to be a godsend since once we got over 9000 feet in elevation the road was rather treacherous. There were usually two wheel tracks that were nearly down to pavement but the rest of the road was covered in more than a foot of snow and ice. While these tracks followed the road, they did not stay in one lane or the other for very long. It took a bit of concentration to keep the car moving safely but there were a few times when another vehicle was coming the other way and we needed to drive up and out of the ruts to leave room for the two of us to pass. I’m not so sure the road should have been open because the conditions were terrible. But the views were great up here!

A Good Amount of Snow Up Here!

We crested at about 9350 feet and started the drive down. It was bad conditions for a few miles but steadily improved as we headed down. We came upon a few more cars heading up but many of them were not going to make it much farther before they would be forced to turn back simply because of their low clearance. We did one last stop before heading out to see Grotto Falls. Even though we were down around 6500 feet and the road was fine, this trail was covered in snow and ice. A few spots in the sun were now in thick and deep mud. We ran into several other groups of people trying to make the hike. We were all at one short but steep ice covered portion of the trail. Those coming down were sliding on their butts and those of us going up were struggling to make it. Chris opted to turn back but I pushed on and made it to the falls. It was quite beautiful and I had it all to myself. I managed to make it back with only muddy boots. This area would be nice to explore during the warmer months since there are so many hiking trails.

Grotto Trailhead

Falls in the Grotto

Closeup View

With our 2 nights coming to an end, we will be heading to the lower elevations and warmer temperatures of St George Utah which will be nice after having over a week of very cold temperatures.