Karen and I are having a love affair - with a road!!! Highway 261 in Southern Utah.
Definitely not for the faint of heart. 6425 feet above sea level dropping 1100 feet in under 3 miles on hairpin curves at a 10% grade. Did I mention gravel road, barely 2 lanes wide and NO guardrails. 5mph? How about 3mph just to be on the safe side? Stay on the designated roads? OK sure. No problem. Where else would I want to go? Where the "designated road" ends a 1100 foot cliff starts - straight down!! Did I mention - NO guardrails? Oh yes, I did.
Your worst nightmare is that a semi is coming at you from the other direction.
Highway 261 (on Cedar Mesa) is located in southern Utah. It runs 34 miles connecting Hwy 163 just north of Mexican Hat, with Hwy 95, just east of Natural Bridges National Monument. The highway is part of the Utah section of the Trail of the Ancients, a National Scenic Byway. It includes steep switchbacks as it traverses the Moki Dugway.
Year after year we try to get the perfect picture of the "feeling" we get driving up and down hwy 261. Year after year we fail. We have some pretty awesome pictures. There is no disputing that - but there is just no way a picture can capture the butterflies, the heart flutters, weak knees and, of course, all our giggles, our ooohhhs and ahhhhs and those OMG's! |
©Jumpy 2008 - 2022
It's all in the Signs
