Spring Creek in Capitol Reef 2018

I heard good things about the hike in lower Spring Creek in Capitol Reef National Park. Turns out they're all true!

It's a non-technical shuttle hike of about 10 mi through spectacular Navajo and Wingate sandstone gorges. I decided to take the upstream route, from the junction with the Fremont River up to the Chimney Rock trailhead, mainly because it would shorten our shuttle a little bit — we were camping in the Dixie-Fishlake National Forest on Boulder Mountain to the west. I was a little bit concerned about the start of the hike, where we would have to cross the Fremont River, but this has been a dry year and the river was barely a foot deep.

The Navajo domes and walls were pretty at the bottom of the canyon, and it just kept getting better as we ascended. The walls went from merely tall to enormous, and the wall decorations were numerous and often bizarre. Our necks got stiff from looking up at the amazing pinnacles and walls. The weather behaved nicely, with a cool (and sometimes blustery) breeze along with patches of cloud that brought shade at just the right moments.

Rather than slog through the mud, we took the bypass route around the short central slot section. The Park Service bills the bypass as exposed, but we found it to be a perfectly serviceable trail, albeit on a steep hillside.

The upper Wingate sandstone section is just as colossal as the lower Navajo section. I thought that the painting and staining on the walls was magnificent. The fork that led to Chimney Rock Trailhead, our exit, was deep and red. We had to climb a a pass on the crumbly Chinle formation to get out of the Spring Creek drainage, and we stumbled over a number of big petrified logs. I mistook one of the first ones for a trail bar because it ran right across the trail.

On the drive back down SR-24 to pick up the shuttle vehicle, we saw hundreds of people queued on the Hickman Bridge trail. It looked like an escalator at a big shopping mall. I was happy to avoid that bustle by doing Spring Creek instead.

On the way back west to camp, we stopped at the Sulphur Creek Goosenecks overlook. I was impressed at the depth of the gorge, and the lengthy drop from the overlook's edge.

Many thanks to Leslie and Stanley for helping to make this such a fine trip!

go to the Spring Creek gallery