Day 25

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States: Utah
Miles driven: 134
Miles hiked: 4.5
Slept: In back of the truck off the road on Highway 12.
10 words or less: Hiked slot canyons and to a natural bridge! Chinese comedians.

I Left My Heart in Escalante

My heart belongs to Escalante and Highway 12.

I awoke feeling a little more human than I had in a few nights. I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a toilet nearby and not have to pee behind a bush in the middle of the night. I’d seen some pretty scary pit toilets over the last few weeks but I will take a scary pit toilet over accidentally sitting on a cactus or startling an elk at 2am any day.

At first light I hiked the vacant trail to Mossy Cave and a small waterfall. Next I drove back to the town of Escalante to get a hiking map from the visitor center. After gasing up, I was hoping to find a place to grab some fresh fruits. Was I in luck. As you can see in the photo below, you get a lot for $1 at the farmer’s market in Escalante. Apples, peaches and cucumbers. All were DELICIOUS!

What you get for $1 at the Escalante farmer’s market.

The rest of the day I had a fun time driving through the muddy washes that crossed Hole in the Rock Road and hiking the Dry Fork Slots area, including another canyon called Peekaboo, then Spooky then the actual Dry Fork slot canyon itself. My hiking boots were done – I’d had it with them and my poor toe refused to go back in them again. So I had just wore my running shoes. Oh man, how I wished I hadn’t of done that! Peekaboo starts off with the 12′ vertical climb up a sheer face. There’s small divits in the stone to use as foot and hand-holds – small. Very small. Not at all an easy climb with the wrong shoes. I got up, and as I looked back to see how the hell I was going to get down without good shoe traction, there was an elderly Chinese man with his wife looking up at me.

He held up his camera and asked “I take picture?”

I cocked my head to the side and replied “I’ll fall, and you’ll take my picture?”

“Yeh. I take picture you fall. That good ok?”

No. No, not ok! I smiled and raised my arms up in victory like I’d just summitted Kilmanjaro. Click! I scampered up the next obstacle, but the shoes. The shoes! I didn’t get too far in, but was so curious to see the rest of the slot. It was so cool how the arches formed over this narrow canyon. The pot holes I came across were full of slimy water. I did not trust my shoes to get me out safely dry, but slimy, muddy and wet? Uh, no. Disappointed, I turned back and very, very carefully shimmied down the sheer 12′ rock face.

I continued on down the wash to Spooky. I can see why they call it that. Its sometimes dark walls narrow up pretty fast. I’m not sure I’d fit through if I were 15lbs heavier or had D cups. Though I only had to chimney up one section, I did a lot of squeezing sideways through passages that smooshed me like a panini. It was pretty fun! Dumbmas me wanted to track the depth I was getting to into the slot by using my GPS watch. They don’t work in slot canyons. Derp! It was fun though! On my way out I ran into the Chinese guy again. We traded places once we found a section wide enough to fit us both. He said to tell his wife he’d be out in 10 minutes. Near the opening of the slot I ran into her (she took the pic of me in the slot). When I told her her husband would be out in 10 minutes, she rolled her eyes and said, in the most sarcastic ESL voice I’d ever heard, “that what he say!” We had a good laugh.

On the way back up the 26 miles on Hole in the Rock road I stopped at Devil’s Garden for a quick lunch and to take some cool pictures of the scenery. After that I drove to what I thought was Lower Calf Creek Falls trailhead. What can I say. I grabbed the wrong trail map from the visitor center and just went for it. What was supposed to be a 6 mile round trip hike with some distinctive features pointed out on the map, turned out to be a 4 mile hike on the wrong trail. Derp! I started to figure it out but didn’t believe my own eyes – I trusted the map. I couldn’t see the pictographs that were pointed out clearly on the map. Although most of the canyon features were identical to the Calf Creek map, I was actually on the Escalante River Trail. But I was in for a surprise. Wait for it.

After crossing the somewhat swift moving Escalante river several times, I crossed paths with two uber hippies. The white, barefooted, blonde dreadlock kind. They asked me if the bridge was nearby. Well sure, I said, it was behind me a mile and a half. What I didn’t realize was that they were probably talking about a natural bridge. Like maybe the one I came upon about 10 minutes later. How did they not see this? They must have walked right past it, oblivious. The bridge I was thinking they’d asked about was a footbridge under the road bridge by the trailhead. Whoopsies! My bad. I never saw them again, but I did score a sweet turquoise bandana they’d dropped on the trail. Or was that some sort of emergency makeshift bread-crumb on their Hansel and Gretl voyage? Whoopsies! My bad.

The bridge was pretty dope. No pun intended for the hippies. At the last river crossing before returning to the trailhead I met another barefoot hiker. What was with that? Cactus and snakes. Perfect for naked feet hiking. Anyway, she slowly made her way across the rivers rocky bottom and we chatted a bit. Her name was Jennifer. I’d asked if she had seen the hippies. Nope. She was looking for some petroglyphs – I told her I had pretty much eye-raped the canyon walls and saw none. She went in anyway. Worth the hike to see the bridge, I said, and we parted ways. I continued on to a second trail that went onto private land. It was a bit more brushy and remote. After a mile or so I turned back and met up with Jennifer again at the trailhead. No luck on the pictographs. We talked about the falls hike and agreed to try to meet up there in the morning.

Again I chased the sunset to find a place to park for the night and car camp. There are a few great shots looking out into the canyons in the photos below. Love it!

Up until today I had been keeping notes in my journal of how many miles and driven and hiked and how much money I’d spent (every dollar!). That morning I had totaled up the bucks and was pleasantly surprised at how little I’d spent! I decided to treat myself to dinner and went to a little grill in the town of Boulder, just a few miles from where I planned to camp for the night.

If you ever want to meet people, sit down in a diner and spread out a road map on the table. A guy at the next table having dinner with his nephew asked me where I was heading to. “Wherever looks good!” I replied. We got into a great conversation about the area and places we’d both been to and enjoyed. I was toying with the idea of driving the Burr Trail all the way to Bullfrog Marina in Glen Canyon. It was a huge shortcut, but was a lot of gravel road to drive and I wasn’t sure with all the rain that it was passable. He’d been on it that day and encouraged me to go for it. This guy was so nice, he even gave me 2 audio books and 4 episodes of an NPR show I really liked, all on cds, after he heard of my ipod failure.