Listen to "Wild Grin" by Rural Alberta Advantage. I wake up every morning and pop my head out of my sleeping bag in the canyonlands with a big grin knowing this is the dumbest thing I've ever done and its no secret I love it.
On April 20th I was dropped back off and did 2.5 miles near Willow Tank Slide. On April 21st I did 16 miles after fighting Monday Canyon to Roger's Canyon. On April 22nd I did 20.4 miles to Reese Canyon and camped next to Last Chance Creek. On April 23rd I did 21.8 miles to Kaibito Spring in Paradise Canyon. On April 24th I did 21.7 miles to Round Valley Slot Canyon. On April 25th I did 23.6 miles and camped along the Paria River. On April 26th I did 22.5 miles to Willis Creek. On April 27th I did a 15.1 mile road walk into Tropic.
I am so thankful for the ability to recharge in Escalante. After the last section I was pretty beat up mentally and physically and needed a day off trail and there is no one better way to do it than to spend time with another thru hiker who understands exactly what I need (his exact words were "you look frazzled"). Escalante is a small town but it does have a bakery and I pretty much spent the entire day on their patio just going in for more rounds of baked goods and hot coffee. I did have one beer when I came off trail but to be honest I've had almost no desire to drink on the Hayduke, I dont know if it's because I'm borderline always dehydrated or what, but normally on a trail grabbing a beer was the first thing I would do in town and now it's not even on my to do list (I must be getting old).
Z dropped me back off where he picked me up and I started the next section. Infront of me was a wall that is 50 miles long (it's called the fiftymile bench) and 1,300 feet high. I just stared at it because it wasn't obvious how I was going to get to the top. I followed the map which lead to a horse trail which lead to a section of the wall that someone carved a trail into, it was steep but doable and at the top I once again got stunning views of the Escalante river basin (it looks better from a far rather than from down in the hellish river banks).
I cross-countried across the mesa to a clear running spring and tanked up on 8 liters of water before heading out to Monday Canyon. There was a remote cabin near the spring which is literally in the middle of nowhere. I've seen way to many horror movies and don't even snoop around them and just keep moving before anybody or anything realizes I'm there. The next canyon I entered was Monday Canyon, and it was rough going. It had boulders strewn about it the entire length of the canyon, some the size of cars and some larger than houses. It reminded me of Mahoosucs Notch on the Appalachian Trail, but was 10 miles long vs 1 mile on the AT. You have 4 options when going around the obstacles:left, right, up and down (yes down is a option since often you can often crawl through the crevices) I always pick the wrong way and end up back tracking to get around the huge blockades. At the end of the day I was beat and only managed a 16 mile day. I set up camp in Rogers Canyon next to some running water (which wasn't supposed to be there, but ill never complain about additonal water sources) and passed out by 830.
The next day I continued to boulder hop through Roger's Canyon until I hit Navajo Canyon, the floor of Najavo Canyon cleared up and had a lot less obstacles. I got my hiking groove back but I guess I was so excited that I was able to move freely again that I missed my canyon turnoff and went a mile down the wrong canyon (I hate when I do that). The skies were looking ominous and it started to rain really hard, I wasn't thrilled to be in a canyon at that moment because of flash floods and kept my eye out for all of my possible escape routes. I am told you can hear the chocholate milk of death coming about 10 to 15 seconds before it hits so I didn't have any music or audio books playing; I hope to never find out if that warning is true or not. Rule #2 in the desert is water dictates all logistics. This may sound obvious since the lack of water is typically most peoples fear in the desert and water sources dictate the hiking route, the seasons you hike, the speed at which you can hike and the amount of reserves you carry between points; but too much water also dictates your movement. Flash floods kill people every year and since the drainage of some of the tributaries are so large you can get caught in a flash flood and have blue skies above you because it's pouring rain upstream and you never even saw a rain cloud. I always keep an extra days of food on me incase I have to abandon a canyon and wait out a flood above the water line. I'm hiking before the wet season so my chances of getting caught in a flood are small, but there have been some crazy weather patterns the last few years so I don't take anything for granted.
I jumped on a jeep road for 18 miles and it dumped me out at Grosvenor Arch. This may sound pretentious but arches right now are kind of like cathedrals in Europe, after you have seen 20 of them they kind of lose their luster, but Grosvenor was different it's kind of like the Dom in Köln (Cologne to you heathens). It was a triple buttressed arch with a lot of interesting features and I have never seen an arch like this before. You can actually drive to it, but that didn't even take away from its mystic. After visiting the arch I made my way down trail another 4 miles to get me last buried cache. I started to dig and hit a white bucket pretty quickly and after moving all of the dirt around it I realized I did not recognize the lid. I was really confused and after proding the ground I hit another bucket and after uncovering it realized the second bucket was mine. This was super bizarre. There are no marked spots for caching food, in fact the more obscure of a spot the better. I buried my food about 100 yards off a dirt road in a relatively undescript area, the only way I mentally marked the location was it was next to a dead tree. I didn't move or open the first bucket, I just covered it back up so I don't know if there was food in it or if it had already been used. Now I'm going to spend the rest of the hike wondering who buried their food first, did I bury it next to someone else or did they bury it next to me. I'm still trying to calculate the odds of two of the few Hayduke Hikers placing a cache within a foot of each other when the the option to bury is 100's of football fields in area.
After organizing my resupplies I headed down Round Valley Canyon. There was a slot canyon infront of me, but since I didn't know exactly how long it was I decided not to enter in the evening and get an early start in the morning. My alarm went off at 530a the next morning and I reached for my water bottle which was a solid brick of ice (that might explain the poor sleep that night). There was no way I was getting up in the dark in sub freezing temps without my down jacket which I conveniently mailed home in Escalante. The weather report said it wasn't supposed to get below 39 degrees that night so I don't know if my water bottle or the weather man was lying. I let the sun warm me up for awhile and then jumped down into the slot. Its such a magical experience to be crawling around an extremely narrow canyon with polished walls from the intense water flow (I'm reminded of how high the water gets by the debris left well above my head). The slot gradually opened up into Hackberry Canyon where I was greeted with rock walls in every imaginable shade of yellow. It was easy going and as I continued down the canyon the walls became taller and turned to vibrant reds. There was a small stream flowing and supporting huge grooves of trees; the freshly sprouted green leaves against the red rock background left me feeling like it was Christmas themed canyon. As I made my way to Lower Hackberry Canyon the walls changed again and there were so many plants and trees growing off the sides of the walls the locals call the section Little Zion. I definitely want to re-hike this canyon with friends, especially knowing there are a lot of technical slot canyons dotting the sides of the main canyon that could take a solid week to explore.
