On Saturday, October 30th, David and I headed back to Moab Utah for another attempt to visit Otho Bridge in the North Fork of Mill Creek.
This time we drove up to the Sand Flats Recreation Area and paid to enter. We then drove most of the way through the park before heading off to the north on a dirt road that soon took us fairly near the edge of Mill Creek Canyon. This allowed us to check out several small class ‘D’ sized natural arches in the area.
To find Otho Bridge, we had to hike west along the ridge until we could find a way down to the canyon bottom. We could then continue hiking west down Mill Creek until we found the correct side canyon heading south for Otho Natural Bridge.
Otho Bridge was right at the very end of a short side canyon. It turned out to be much larger than we had expected, a large class ‘B’ bridge. It was very photogenic but the late afternoon shadows hindered taking good photographs.
We found that someone had made a short ladder out of a tree limb so that you could climb up the shelf on the north side of an area nearly under the bridge. Here people had set up past camps. Here someone had constructed a rock table and chairs and the table had a notebook sealed in a plastic bag. We read some of the entries in the notebook but the main author was pretty freaky and hard to understand. It seems that this was some sort of spiritual retreat area. (I’m betting that this “retreat” area also involved significant quantities of weed.)
Meanwhile, the sun was quickly going down and we had to hurry to get out of the canyon and back to the truck. Then another long ride home again.