Utah BDR Scouting Trip

I'm here at the start of the Utah Backcountry Discovery Route in Mexican Hat, Utah. And we're getting ready to start the scouting trip. It's early April right now and I'm with Bryce Stevens and our friend Rob also joined us and we're going to spend the next four days scouting the southeastern corner of Utah so that we can come back here in September and do the entire route. We wanted to look into this wash. The wash is kind of consolidated here and eroded a little slot canyon. There's cottonwoods here. I don't want to look around for some ruins, but just generally wanted to look into the little slot here. The road builders, which might have been ranchers at the time, I don't know, they wedged a car in here to create the bridge. That's hard to believe. The water's going underneath the road right here. It's pretty amazing as people are passing through these spaces on the Backcountry Discovery Routes. It's a place like Utah that has amazing ruins and ancient artifacts and rock walls and dwellings to see. It makes for great side trips and interesting learning as you're traveling through these remote places. We're very far from any major town. You get out here and you really have a sense of exploration. You find something like this and you can really tell what it was like at some point for somebody to live here. Pretty incredible. Bryce will talk all day if the camera's rolling, so we need to keep moving. Well, my name's Joey Allen. I'm an artist and I also give art lessons. These are some of my artwork. This is acrylic and oil. I've been through rough life, but the thing is, all this made me stronger. We've stopped along the way, pulled off, got off the motorcycles and hiked out to this absolutely amazing spot. It is a peninsula that juts out into this canyon here. This is one of the most amazing places I've ever discovered. Absolutely gorgeous. Just one example of the types of things that you'll discover as you're traveling on Backcountry Discovery Routes. We're going to go out and look at a ruin and take a look at some hidden artifacts on top of this peninsula and also reach the top of this cap rock, which has 360-degree views in all directions throughout the region. This specific place I've been to before about a decade ago. At the time, I nicknamed it the Anasazi Hotel because it is, to me, too nice for somebody to just live here. It's absolutely gorgeous, and I think they probably rented it out to other Anasazi people living in these canyons for the spectacular view and the incredible feeling here. This one is a door and a window. This is one room right here. That might be the deluxe suite. This one is quite small. I'm guessing this was a studio. This is just one of the most amazing places in the world, let alone the United States or Utah, and one of the things that you'll find along Backcountry Discovery Routes as you're riding and driving through these incredible remote places. We found the best place to camp tonight down by a creek, kind of sheltered from the wind up on the top, and if it starts to rain, we've really got some solid roofs over our head. Camping out here in the wilds in Utah.