Bicentennial Highway

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Hanksville

   Hanksville is a crossroads, and nothing more is required of it. A few dozen buildings, a gas station or two, a motel, a diner, and a long view of pale hills in south-central Utah, where the highways meet at the edge of some of the emptiest country in the lower forty-eight. The land is red, grey and pink, with eroded badlands, buttes and domes, and the sky is huge. Summer days are fiercely hot, nights are cool, and the silence is part of the attraction.

   Read the complete Hanksville write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Hanksville is where the day begins. Next is Hite Overlook.

2. 2. Hite Overlook

   Out here the map is mostly blank and the horizon is mostly rock. Highway 95 crosses the southeast of Utah through country that feels deliberately unfinished: slickrock benches, red-and-cream canyon walls, thin stands of juniper, and a sky with nothing to do but stay enormous. Hite Overlook sits above the old crossing of the Colorado River, where the river, drowned by Lake Powell, widens into a flat green-grey arm among the cliffs. The name comes from Cass Hite, a prospector who worked the river sands for gold in the 1880s and helped lure a trickle of others into this remote country.

   Read the complete Hite Overlook write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Hite Overlook comes up about 77 km into the recorded legs. Next is Natural Bridges.

3. 3. Natural Bridges

   The strange thing about Natural Bridges is how quiet it is. Three great sandstone spans, Sipapu, Kachina and Owachomo, arch across dry canyon floors a short distance off Highway 95, in a corner of Utah that most people drive past on the way to somewhere with a more famous name. President Theodore Roosevelt made this Utah's first national monument in 1908, and the monument has stayed small, sparsely visited and unspoilt ever since. The bridges were carved by running water, not by wind, which is easy to forget when the creek beds are bone dry.

   Read the complete Natural Bridges write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 186 km into the recorded legs you reach Natural Bridges. Next is Blanding.

4. 4. Blanding

   Blanding is a quiet town of under four thousand people in the far southeast of Utah, at around 1,800 metres, and it serves as a gateway to some of the least visited and most extraordinary country in the American Southwest. It was settled by Mormon pioneers in the early twentieth century, and it still feels like a ranching and farming town, with wide streets, neat houses and mesas on the horizon. For travellers, it is a base for exploring the canyons and ruins of Cedar Mesa and the Bears Ears region.

   Read the complete Blanding write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Blanding closes the day.