Utah photo dump 4: missed opportunities, cornucopia of riches, and ruins

Day 10: Kanab to Page via 89A

We knew a few days in advance that it was supposed to rain on Saturday, the day we had planned to hike another slot canyon on our way from Kanab to Page AZ. Wire Pass is a wide-ish slot canyon, a tributary to Buckskin Gulch; Buckskin Gulch is the longest (13 miles!) and deepest slot canyon in the southwest, and possibly in the world. We had hoped to hike Wire Pass plus a little bit of Buckskin Gulch, but everything we had read about slot canyons included warnings about flash floods. It doesn't take much rain to flood a slot, and it doesn't even have to be raining where you're hiking: rain from as far as 50 miles away can drain into the slots and flood.

Nonetheless, as we drove along highway 89A, the dirt road to Wire Pass and Buckskin Gulch beckoned. We drove a few miles down it, watching tendrilly poufs of rain and virga scattered across the sky. The road seemed quite passable for our 2wd rental car, but we turned around after about five miles because it was clearly raining near us, if not on us. On our way out, a dozen cars passed us heading toward the canyon, and we wondered what they knew that we didn't. Or what we knew that they didn't. Oh well. We have something to come back for.

Rain followed us, preceded us, or dumped on us the entire way--and in Page, briefly turned to gravelly snow (what Germans call Graupel--not quite hail)--but we happily filled the Buckskin gap with three flood-unlikely hikes:

First, Toadstool Hoodoos along 89A in Grand Staircase - Escalante: 

Second, The New Wave near Page AZ. Signage calls this the Beehive Trail, and AllTrails calls this Rock Lane Trail, but it's popularly called the New Wave to encourage those of us who don't win the Wave lottery to enjoy other eroded striated sandstone formations in the vicinity. You can't see the wind in the photos, but we considered ourselves lucky to have been blown away only figuratively.

The trail was impeccably marked.

And third, the iconic Horseshoe Bend just south of Page. I briefly held the "Local Legend" title on Strava for "most attempts completed" on the "To the Bend" segment in the past 90 days. The number of "efforts" was a whopping two, because we had 45 minutes between our arrival at the overlook and sunset, and decided to kill time by walking back to the parking lot to use the pit toilets, then walking back to the overlook again. The record was seized by another walker the very next day, who "set the new bar," also with "2 efforts," so either she walked faster or peed faster. In any event, we were already on the road again and thus unable to seize the title back. 

A fraction of the many, many people waiting for the sun to set. 

Another photo for the Caspar David Friedrich 
Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer collection 

Day 11: Page to Blanding via Monument Valley and House on Fire Ruins

This was a long driving day, but we still managed to fit in over nine miles of hiking. First stop, Wildcat Trail in the stupendously fascinating Monument Valley. The trail takes you around the west mitten.

Our next destination was a canyon a little west of Bluff, UT, and our navigation device directed us to take UT highway 261. We figured it was, you know, just a highway--but it turns out 261 is the "Moki Dugway Scenic Backway," which is the usual insanely scenic Utah road until it becomes a gravel road that switchbacks 1,200 feet up the side of a cliff over the course of 3 miles. S kept saying "wow, this is quite the view," while I clutched the door armrest and kept saying "eyes on the road, eyes on the road!"

Our goal was Mule Canyon, to see the House on Fire ruins. We'd read that there are more Anasazi ruins in the canyon, but we didn't manage to see any others.

Utah photo dump 3: Bryce, Zion, and Kanab

Day 6: Escalante to Kanab via Bryce Canyon National Park

We hiked three trails in Bryce Canyon National Park: Mossy Cave Trail, which we visited early enough in the morning that only one other car was in the parking area; Queen's Garden - Navajo Trail Loop, which felt hugely crowded after three days in Escalante, even though there were some quiet stretches; and Bristlecone Loop at the southernmost end of the park. The acrophobe required crampons for the first two hikes, while S got by just with grippy hiking boots.

Mossy Cave Trail:

Bryce has the world's largest collection of hoodoos.

Mossy Cave: icicles in the winter, mosses in the summer.

Queen's Garden - Navajo Trail Loop:

Queen's Garden is named for the pinkish top of the hoodoo in the
center of this photograph; apparently it looks like Queen Victoria.

My camera doesn't capture elevation differences well;
this part of the trail had a dozen or so switchbacks.

Bristlecone Loop. Hunh, Somehow I managed not to take any photos of the most interesting part of this trail, which was the large expanse of deep snow we got to tromp through (plus a ton more hoodoos). So instead, here's a photo of an arch that we stopped to see on our way back from Bristlecone Loop, plus a shot of the first movie theater I've been in since the start of the pandemic (Bryce Visitors Center, 20-minute film about the park). Speaking of the pandemic, Utah is still plastered with signs saying people must wear masks indoors, but few people actually wear them. (We do, which makes it easier to identify us as tourists.)

Day 7: The Wave lottery, Kanab morning hike, Zion afternoon hike

We spent four nights in Kanab. On our first morning, we and about 100 other people showed up at the Kanab Center to toss our names into the lottery for permits to The Wave, the area's most iconic and most photographed striated sandstone formation. Ninety of us left the lottery permit-less, while ten lucky folks won permits allowing them to hike to The Wave the next day. The whole system is going online starting March 15, which will make life easier for everyone, albeit less entertaining for those who (like me) enjoy gawking at rituals like this. Diehards can resubmit their applications the next morning, but we had too many other things to do.

We followed the lottery with a hike that AllTrails calls "Kanab City to Connector Trail," but signage calls it S---w Trail. Someone has crossed out or painted over the word "S---w" much of the way up the trail; Googling suggests the name may eventually be revised. 

S---w trailhead

Looking north at the end of the trail

Heading back down to Kanab

In the afternoon, S Zoomed into a dissertation defense. Afterward, we took advantage of the remaining three hours of sunlight to zip over to Zion for a 6-mile rim hike. 

Jolley Gulch

Day 8: Zion

We were so enchanted with the alpine scenery on the rim that we decided to spend the next day exploring more of Zion. Our original plan was to do an 11-mile loop from the east rim down into the canyon and back up again. Unfortunately, the dirt road to the start of the trail was inaccessible even to 4wd vehicles due to mud, and we weren't inclined to hike an extra 3 miles through mud in both directions to reach the trailhead (despite descending from a long line of people who walked 3 miles to school every day, in the snow, uphill both ways). 

Instead, we drove back down to the park entrance and, along with 1,000 or so other people, into the bottom of the canyon. There were traffic jams at popular spots.

Everyone wanted to hike the Emerald Pools trail.

During peak season, you can only access this road via shuttle bus, but when we visited on Thursday March 3, the shuttle bus was running only on weekends--meaning we, along with everyone else, could drive the entire length of the road and create traffic jams together. Turns out we were driving in with the mid-morning crowd. This is the crowd that wants to see the canyon in the morning light, but doesn't get their act in gear to drive in early enough to beat the crowds. (In our defense, our act was totally in gear for the mudded-out rim trail.)

We eventually made it to the end of the road, where all of the parking spots were taken; so we back-tracked a little to a pull-off, then walked back to the end for the Riverside Walk. 

Here are all the cool kids, wearing waders and water
shoes, setting off for The Narrows. The trail is the river.

Afterward, we drove back to the traffic jam sites, where by late morning parking spots had become available, and set off on the stunning Emerald Pools trail. 

Turkeys!

Lower pool...

Upper pool. Didn't photograph middle pool.

The views were consistently gorgeous.

Six miles walked so far, still lots of time, so we headed to the Visitors Center and hiked the Watchman Trail.

I've started a series of photographs of S channeling
Caspar David Friedrich's Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer 

Gentle readers, I hear you asking why we didn't hike the famous Angel's Landing Trail at Zion. Acrophobia, my friends. And crowds. If you're planning to go to Zion, know that the park is going to start requiring permits for hiking Angel's Landing, starting April 1, 2022.

On the way out of the park, we stopped for one more short hike. I made it about halfway, then declined to cross some wooden-plank covered cantilever-supported scaffolding over a canyon. (My personal Rules of Acrophobia have a whole internally consistent section on bridges; I didn't know cantilevered scaffolding was included in the Rules until I encountered it at Zion, but it makes total sense). S and 100 other folks went all the way to the end, and none of them plunged to their deaths.

Day 9: Kanab Cottonwood Trail & soup

Rain was in the forecast on Friday. In the morning, we made it halfway through the 8-mile Kanab Cottonwood Trail before the clouds moved in, the wind picked up, and we decided to bail. We went back to our AirBnb, made a pot of lentil soup, and unmemorably frittered away the afternoon by not hiking.

Despite having lived in Tucson for four years,
I forgot that desert rain is often very localized