Cathedral Gorge 2019

My Memorial Day trip for the WMC this year set a personal record — 25 participants! That's much more like classic WMC outings from 50 years ago, and we don't even have a Club bus any more. Only a few people cancelled, in spite of the wet weather in SLC.

Because of all of the snow in the high country, I decided to go to a lower elevation this year. I remembered a wonderful visit to Cathedral Gorge State Park in Nevada over Thanksgiving 2017, and I decided to put Cathedral Gorge on the schedule. I was thinking that only a handful of people would register; it is, after all, in Nevada.

Nevada hasn't escaped the wet weather. On the Wednesday before the trip, there was a big rainstorm that left the Cathedral Gorge campground a big mess, with flooding and mud everywhere. Fortunately we had some folks in our group who came down to the campground on Thursday and who were able to improvise — hence we made a last-minute call to switch our campground to Kershaw-Ryan State Park, about 20 minutes to the south. Kershaw-Ryan has better drainage and nice tent sites, and (like Cathedral Gorge) it features (ahem) the critically important amenity of hot showers. After getting a call from Susan Allen, I was able to put out a last-minute e-mail announcing the campground switch, and all but 2 people got the message. (They caught up with us later.)

I arrived at noon on Friday. It's Nevada, so there wasn't that much competition for camp sites — at one point we were occupying six campsites, mostly adjacent. The campground charges by the vehicle rather than by the site, so it didn't make sense to economize on the number of sites.

Not long after I arrived, the Thursday group returned from a trip to see the Elgin Schoolhouse State Park at the south end of Rainbow Canyon. I joined them for a trip into Caliente to check out the free Memorial Day customer-appreciation lunch at the Nevada Bank and Trust. I used the opportunity to try taking photos with my new cell phone; my regular camera is in the shop, and this was the first time that I'd used the cell phone for trip photos. (I'm still adjusting, as you can tell by the occasional fingertip in the picture...)

After lunch, we headed over to the BLM office on the south side of town. They have a number of well-produced flyers describing activities in the area. We decided to visit Rainbow Canyon rock art sites for the afternoon.

There was substantial evidence of flooding on the (paved) Rainbow Canyon road. My Thanksgiving trip had led me to believe that Meadow Valley Wash hardly ever flows in Rainbow Canyon, much less floods. That was an eye-opener. (In fact, I learned later that NV 317 in Rainbow Canyon was massively washed out by floods in January 2005, and was only fully re-opened in the last few years.)

I had been to the first two rock art sites at Etna and Grapevine Canyon. The Etna site is fun because you access it through a tunnel built by the railroad to divert water from the canyon that holds the pictographs. (Watch your head!) Just up the canyon from the pictographs and up a steep hillside are a couple of deep alcoves that apparently served as living quarters for local people. They are now inhabited by bees (hornets?), and swallows — the roof of the first alcove has several mud nests built into the ceiling. We saw plenty of flowers, an indication of how wet the weather has been.

Grapevine Canyon is a pretty place, but the rock art is a bit of a downer because it has been vandalized. It looks like people have tried to remove pictographs by chiseling them off the wall, and they have “improved” some of the petroglyphs by deepening them, and adding graffiti. On the plus side, Hummingbird Spring is a pretty area, with big cliffs and tangled masses of grapevines.

We checked out the other two rock art sites, but they were somewhat underwhelming. We returned to the campground and found that other people had arrived. Over the course of the late afternoon and evening, all but two people showed up. I thought that was amazing.

go to the Rainbow Canyon gallery

Caliente is surrounded by massive amounts of volcanic rocks. Its location was formerly a huge volcanic caldera 36 - 18 million years ago that burped up vast amounts of ash and lava. The landscape was buried in hot ash deposits, which melted together to form a rock called tuff. Tuff tends to be brittle and crumbly, and it often erodes into bizarre shapes.

On my trip to southeastern Nevada in 2017, I visited a very special canyon in tuff that has no name; I decided to call it Tuff Towers Canyon, just so that I could talk about it. The hike starts at the Rainbow Canyon Road, 8 miles south of Caliente on NV 317. We parked there and hiked east up the canyon. Recent flooding has repaved the canyon bottom, so in the lower section, the going is easier than it was in 2017. We saw lots of flowers, including cactus and cliffrose.

I was looking for the turn-off to the Towers, but I missed it and we hiked further up the main canyon. It turns out that the main fork is also spectacular. It's a garden-like area with manzanita and pinyon, surrounded by bizarre beehives of tuff. The tuff is creamy-colored, speckled with ejecta; we found quartz crystals in it. We explored an upper bench area, then came back down.

As we descended, I finally recognized the turn-off to the Tuff Towers. The wash bottom is quite bouldery and rugged — no repaving happened here! The wash bed climbs steadily to the base of the Towers, passing through a gate with tall, creamy walls on both sides.

The main wash is quite brushy at this point, and it is blocked by a pour-off in a couple hundred feet. However, a narrow canyon takes off to the south just after the gates, and I wanted to explore it some more. We scrambled over boulder piles and bashed through thickets, getting very familiar with Fremont's barberry, a small tree with spiny holly-like leaves. The canyon has vertical walls and is maybe 20 feet wide in the upper part. One awkward boulder was a minor scrambling challenge, but several of us squeezed past. 50 yards later, an overhanging chockstone put an emphatic end to the hike.

If I ever get out here again, I'd love to see if there is a way around the pour-off onto the next level above the gates...

go to the Tuff Towers gallery

We had lunch back at camp, then drove north to Cathedral Gorge. After a day and a half of sunny weather, the park still had muddy sections, especially at the bottom of the deep slots and crevices, but it was generally fine for hiking. That's a huge difference from Thursday, when the landscape had turned to slippery mud and the rangers warned of people breaking their legs. The formations at Cathedral Gorge are made from montmorillonite, a major component of bentonite clay; it's used in lubricating mud for oil drilling, and for cat litter.

Cathedral Gorge is a very cool place, and I was happy to see that our big group was having fun there. I had a goal of showing off two places — a cavern that I call the Cathedral, and a bizarre series of natural bridges that I call the Tunnel. I found the Cathedral in 2017, but I hadn't see the Tunnel since my first visit to the park in 1990.

Of course I walked by the Cathedral, and I had to backtrack to pick it up. It's a bit a of a scramble to get up to the entrance, which is covered by a slab and is tall enough to stand up in. Alas, this time the inside was far too slippery to visit, so we had to settle for the view down to the chambers from above.

I had an idea of how I had gone wrong while looking for the Tunnel last time, and I thought that I'd found it on the Google Maps satellite view. We hiked up the draw, but we were disappointed at the end, where there was a tunnel suitable only for crouching dwarves. We started walking back down the draw, but I wasn't willing to quit right away. I tried to get people to join me to check out a side drainage; I managed to convince 6 folks to come with me.

We hit the jackpot. Not only was the Tunnel still in existence, it was navigable, with some mud but no pools of water or significant rockfall. As I had remembered, the Tunnel goes on for at least a few hundred yards, with open and closed-over sections. Some sections required a bit of ingenuity to get through, but it kept going and going. There are some spots where a headlamp is very useful. The formations in Cathedral Gorge are so soft and erodable that a natural bridge can be up to 20 yards long. It's unbelievably fun, although it's also a really terrible place for claustrophobes (or arachnophobes).

When we got back to camp, we found that yet more people had arrived. It was really amazing to me how well dinnertime worked with 5 adjacent campsites. It was also nice to have hot showers to wash the mud off!

One interesting feature of Kershaw-Ryan State Park is that large trains go up or down Rainbow Canyon every hour or so. You can hear the thrum of the diesel engines from far away; it's a bit eerie in the middle of the night. The railroad was built by the Union Pacific between 1901 and 1905, and it carries freight between Las Vegas and Salt Lake. Caliente was a busy service town for the railroad until the UP converted from steam to diesel engines. It's still the only incorporated town in Lincoln County. (Thank you, Google.)

go to the Cathedral Gorge gallery

Sunday started out dry, cool and breezy. I thought it would be fun to drive west on US 93 from Caliente to check out the Oak Springs trilobite beds. The BLM has built a small parking lot and a trail that takes you a quarter mile or so to beds of the sedimentary Pioche Formation. They encourage collecting, so we grabbed hammers and pry bars and set off to find us some trilobites.

The trail peters out in a shallow draw filled with zillions of platy fragments of shale. We started turning over the pieces, and indeed, there were lots and lots of trilobites. Most of the critters were disarticulated, with heads separated from thorax segments and tails, but the heads were easy to find and were quite popular. There was one concentrated area that had most of the fossils — apparently there was a major extinction event 520 million years ago that wiped out the family of trilobites that are prevalent here, and the strata that are higher than the trilobite patch are barren.

go to the Oak Springs Trilobites gallery

I had planned to continue west to the Big Rocks Wilderness Area, where we could check out some rock art and hike to a high point with a view of some crazy rock formations. We drove to Pahroc Spring and spread out looking for petroglyphs in the mouth of the gorge. The wind cranked up another notch, and we could see black rain clouds in the distance. We found no petroglyphs, although there were lots of pretty flowers, and a huge Great Basin gopher snake.

Someone mentioned to me that they had seen a plaque off to the side of the road. I had walked up the road to look for it, but I didn't spot it. After we had spent 20 minutes searching for rock art, someone mentioned that the plaque was not actually on the road, but up the hill a little ways on a spur. We backtracked and found the plaque, and indeed, up a rocky slope, there was a gigantic boulder with a cavity underneath; the outside was decorated with petroglyphs, while the cavity contained pictographs. Pretty nice.

By this time, the wind was really getting fierce. I decided that a hike in these conditions was not going to be fun — we'd be on our hands and knees crawling to the summit. I made the call that we would instead drive out to the White River Narrows rock art site, which is north on NV 318 from US 93 at Hiko. I had been to the site one time before, and I knew that its rock art blows away all of the rock art that we'd seen up to that point in the trip.

The White River Narrows are a series of incised meanders in tuff and lava that the White River left behind back in the Pleistocene when its flow was much greater. The White River drains much of central Nevada, flowing down to the Colorado River, and it provides critical water to the wildlife areas and farms of the Pahranagat Valley. The Narrows are part of the new Basin and Range National Monument, and I was pleased to see a plaque on the side of the road promoting it.

We had a pretty color pamphlet describing the rock art areas, and I recognized them as we visited them. There is only a small amount of vandalism, and there are large numbers of really nice petroglyphs. We stopped first at the southern sites, where you drive up the narrows to two large groups of panels on the west side. We then drove back out to pavement and over to the north site. The north site is amazing, both for its density and its quality. We wandered back and forth admiring the art, but the cold wind and sprinkles motivated us to leave after a short while.

On the way back, we stopped to enjoy the kitschy UFO-related signs and businesses at the intersection with NV 375, the “Extraterrestrial Highway”. The 50-foot-tall alien statue was great, but I wasn't willing to shell out $160 for a big bottle of Alien brand tequila.

Back at Kershaw-Ryan, we had pleasant weather for dinner, and we had another fine social hour. About 9 PM, the rain started and continued through about 7 AM. In the morning, no one was motivated to go hiking, so we split up and went our various ways. Some of us visited the little town of Pioche, north of Cathedral Gorge on US 93. Snow had fallen in town overnight. There are lots of fine old buildings and mining artifacts, but I wasn't motivated to get out of the car when it was wet and just barely above freezing. Still, the snow and fog banks made for a pretty drive north to Wendover, and I got home in time to mow the lawn...

go to the White River Narrows gallery