The next day started with a heavy overcast, so did sleep long and had a nice breakfast at the “Moab Jail-House Caffee”. Slowly we packed our stuff and headed to the Isle of Sky Visitor Center to ask for the road conditions and permit for the White Rim Road. The Ranger said it’s a 12h round trip road. As it was already noon, we ask what we could see in “half a day”. She advised us to only go to the “White Crack Campground“, this would be a 7h round trip journey.
So we headed down the “Shaffer Trail” to the “White Rim”. The road winded itself down with sheer cliffs next to it. At the bottom the road look really easy to drive, so we thought the 3.5h she has proposed was easy to beat. After about the exit to the Goosneck Overlook the road became worse. Not really bad, to tough as “Elephant Hill” but still we could no longer drive 20+miles/h… with deep cracks from the little streams, we had to slow down ever so often to cross these.
And then we stopped at a few places along the way to take some nice images and gazed at the landscape. After about 3h shaking left and right, up & down, we came to the junction to the “White Crack Campground”. The last bit of the road was also quite bumpy, but our 4Runner did a perfect job.
We wandered around to find the “White Crack”, which we finally did see… was it worth driving the “White Rim Road” just to see the “White Crack”, probably not… but it was a lot of fun.
It was about 3:30pm when we stared our return… at the junction at the “White Rim Road” we had a discussion to go back the same way or head west to complete the full “White Rim Road”. Knowing that we probably have an other 6-8h ahead and probably have not seen the worst, we still decided to turn west….
After about 5min of driving….PÄNG….. a flat tire! Our right back tire blew up!!! So the decision to turn around was revised…
Ok, we had to change the tire on a rental car… get the manual out and pull the car on the side of the road hill, so the tire was almost lifted into the air by itself, making it simpler for us the jack the car up for the tire replacement. It took us about ten consultations to the car’s operations manual to figure out on how to get the spare tire out…minutes later we had the spare tire down. The car jacked up, and the flat tire off. Mounting the new tire on was simple and about 45min later we headed back to the Visitor Center and to the “White Rim Road” overlook for sunset…
