House Range 2017

It had been a rainy week in Salt Lake, but it was dry and fine out to the southwest in the House Range, west of Delta. Five of us headed out there on Friday afternoon: Stanley, Da, Jerry, Jonathan, and yours truly, organizing the trip for the WMC.

We arrived at 4:30 PM and claimed my favorite site in Stone Cabin Wash. We beat a troop of Boy Scouts from Highland, who managed to drive a truck and trailer up to the end of the truly terrible road, and had to turn around in a narrow space. There were a number of other visitors too — I'm surprised at how well known the Stone Cabin is now. The 'cabin' is just a walled-up alcove along the cliff in the canyon; the real attractions are the towering walls and soaring ledges.

On Saturday morning, Stanley and I went for a hike while the other folks made breakfast. We scrambled up to a ledge in the main canyon just below Stone Cabin Wash, because I was curious about a red splotch on the wall that looks like a filled-in cave. We followed cairns up to the red rock and found red-stained, crystal-lined vugs, mixed with large blocks that I'm guessing were rockfall in the cave before it filled in. There were curious chunks of microcrystalline rock in various shades of red and orange; I'm still baffled about what they're made of. I suggested to Stanley that they were jasperoid or skarn; reading Hintze's 'Geology of Millard County' book (2003) later, I wondered whether this rock came from one of 'the contact metamorphic skarns, where massive garnet (none of gem quality) has replaced some of the metamorphosed sedimentary rocks' (p. 122).

When everyone was ready, we drove down to broad Tule Valley, then south along the range to the Notch. The Notch is what I call the bizarre valley on the north side of Notch Peak; it looks like someone cut a piece of layer cake 3,000 feet thick out of the mountain. The Notch is also fun because there is a bizarre granite intrusion at its foot, where the crystalline granite has squeezed in between layers of the limestone, enhancing the layer cake effect and turning the limestone into alternating white and greenish-black bands of marble. Every time I've visited the Notch, I've seen climbers, and this time was no exception — there was a large contingent who appeared to be from NOLS, and we saw some of them in the Notch working on one of the less scary granite slabs on the south wall. We slogged up the gravel and rubble to the narrow section just under Notch Peak and stared up at the wall. When you're that close to it, it actually looks a little less impressive than it does from further away, perhaps because the wall is so steep that it gets foreshortened.

We had a bit of time after our Notch outing, so I suggested that we go hunt for trilobites. The House Range is famous for its 500-million-year-old trilobite fossils. You can pay to dig them up at the U-Dig-It trilobite mine further north at Swasey Peak, but the same formation (the Wheeler Shale) crops out in Marjum Pass. We pulled off the road and walked over to a shaly hill, and soon we were finding trilobites everywhere. They showed up as black silicified shells, and as impressions on top of slabs. In some places, half of all the slabs seemed to have at least some fragments of trilobites. Da got the hang of trilobite hunting and came back with a huge haul.

On Sunday morning we broke camp and set off up Marjum Canyon and over to the east side of the range. I had seen a spot on a geological map marked as 'sinkhole in alluvium 60 ft in diameter 100 ft deep'. That seemed too good to be true, but I had to check it out. After driving up a bumpy dirt road onto the alluvial fan for Little Horse Canyon, we came to a small fenced-in area. In the middle of the fencing was a hole. Walking up to it, it seems bottomless. The edges are crumbly and it's a bit scary. After your eyes adjust, you can see that it is indeed about a hundred feet deep, with a pathetic broken ladder lying on the floor. It looks unreal, like something from a science fiction movie where a larval monster has erupted from the bowels of the earth. I'm guessing that a large cave collapsed, and the material that fell into it was washed away downstream, leaving a vertical shaft.

After this diversion, we drove south to Miller Canyon. The Club's main experience of Miller Canyon is on the way to the Notch Peak trailhead in neighboring Sawtooth Canyon, but Miller Canyon has some great sights of its own. The road runs below sheer limestone cliffs before reaching a unique area of granite domes and pinnacles. We checked out some of the local historic mine buildings, then we went for a hike up an old road into the granite country. At the spot where the road ends, Da noticed a somewhat vague trail that took off into the forest. We trooped off down the trail, and to my surprise, we were able to follow blazes and tread for roughly a mile. The trail winds through granite outcrops and patches of pinyon forest, with occasional higher-elevation trees like aspens, white firs and Douglas firs. The trail came to an end at a (very small) mining camp, just above a running stream. We had lunch, and then I suggested that we descend to the stream and look for a use trail that might continue up the canyon.

The canyon was really pretty, with patches of aspen and intricate piles of granite boulders. The bad news is that it was choked with brush, much of it in the form of wild roses that caught on clothing and raked bare flesh. We couldn't find anything resembling a trail, and we struggled to find a route through the mess. After a while, we decided to climb the north side of the canyon to see whether the going was any better on top. The answer: nope. The crest of the ridge was just a pile of boulders, creating yet more obstacles. At that point we had gone 0.15 mi from the end of the trail in half an hour, so I called an end to the adventure. The hike back down the trail was very pleasant, especially compared to the bushwhack we'd just finished. We got back to Salt Lake at a civilized hour, instead of returning to the cars after dark covered in scratches...

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