Canyon Country backroad mishap offers lessons in resourcefulness, awareness

Downtown Moab

NEEDLES DISTRICT, Canyonlands National Park -- The day was full of promise -- until "it" caught up with us.

My wife, Lynn, and I had arrived for a long, early October weekend in Canyonlands National Park's relatively unpeopled yet spectacular Needles District, a long way from touristy Moab. The weather was clear and crisp, the kind that makes October so busy in that mountain biking and four-wheeling mecca.

Our 1990 Toyota 4Runner, a trusted veteran of many forays deep into canyon country, was loaded up with camping gear and food. It would see its 20th birthday -- and 215,000th mile -- amid the Needles' intricately eroded, color-banded sandstone labyrinths, which for millennia were home to Anasazi and other native peoples.

Sunset, Peekaboo Springs

After driving more than 500 miles from our home in Idaho, we'd spent a cold night in a tiny, sandy and exposed commercial campsite ($20) at the privately operated Needles Outpost. It's just outside the Needles entrance station. Now we were ready to revisit the wilds of the Needles. We'd accumulated family memories with our kids here, many years before.

On the dash lay our $30 Canyonlands backcountry-camping permit. It was good for two nights at one of only two remote sites at the Salt Creek Canyon's Peekaboo Springs (Google Earth view). We felt lucky to have the reservation.