Gold Butte 2024

Back in January, I'd started planning my WMC camping trips for the spring, and it looked like we were going to have a dry year, after a whopper of a wet year. I had long been interested in visiting Grand Canyon - Parashant National Monument, and this seemed like the perfect time. I wanted to go to the Grand Wash Cliffs and hike some amazing-looking canyons that punch deep, narrow gorges through the cliffs. My goal was to camp at the Grand Gulch Mine, 80 mi from the nearest pavement.

But then the rains came. Parashant is a long way from anywhere, and it would be really bad to get stuck out there if it rained or snowed and the roads turned into mush, or got blocked by flooding.

When people signed up for the trip, I warned them that I would take the group to Gold Butte National Monument next door in Nevada in the event of bad weather. I allocated 5 days for the trip, leaving Thursday March 28th and returning Monday April 1st. As the dates approached, the forecast didn't look very promising — rain would arrive some time on Saturday.

I decided that I'd head down a day early and check out the road to the Grand Gulch Mine. If the road looked drivable by (say) Subarus and it looked like it would be okay if it got wet, then I would meet people in St George on Thursday and lead them into Parashant. If not okay, then Gold Butte.

It took me 3 hours to drive from the end of the pavement at the Utah-Arizona line out to the mine. The road is bladed and maintained to within 3 mi of the mine, and when that section is dry, it's clearly just fine for Subarus and similar vehicles. Even the notorious road section in upper Pigeon Creek was in pretty good shape.

There were two bits of bad news, though. The less important bit was that the last 3 miles of the road to the mine are fairly rugged, and would probably destroy a Subaru. It was slow going in my stock 4Runner. If that were the only problem, then we could just camp a few miles short of the mine and shuttle to the mine to start hikes. (We wouldn't have this lovely new toilet at camp, though.)

But the worse news was that it was really obvious that the road turns to soup when it's wet. It had been wet recently, as attested by the deep ruts and wet potholes at the high points of the drive. On the drive back to St George, I convinced myself that Parashant just wasn't going to work out given the wet forecast. After 10 hours of driving, I stumbled into a motel room and crashed for the night.

go to the Grand Gulch Mine photo gallery

I met the group on Thursday at 1 PM at the interagency visitor center on Riverside Drive in St George. I let them know that I was giving up on Parashant, but since the group had little or no experience with Gold Butte, this turned out not to be a problem!

We camped at Whitney Pocket in the north end of the monument. The road to Whitney Pocket is (badly) paved, so if it rained, I figured that we'd stand a decent chance of getting out rather than getting stuck.

We arrived with plenty of time left in the day. I suggested that we could go see the Falling Man rock art site, just a few miles away. Somehow I always manage to see yet more rock art when I visit, and this time was no exception — Shawn found a straightforward route up a crag that put us right next to some of the best petroglyphs.

go to the Falling Man photo gallery

I had organized a trip to Gold Butte back in 2022, and I had made plans for a couple of hikes there that we didn't get to. I decided to do one of them on this trip — a hike down Garden Wash through two sets of narrows, then looping back via the narrows in the next major wash to the south.

Garden Wash was great. The road to the trailhead is fairly rough and brushy, but we had no trouble getting to the end. There are some old diggings at the top of the canyon, where I wondered how on earth the miners had managed to move heavy equipment to the precarious mine workings. Around the point where the canyon starts to get narrow, there are some slabs containing shells of belemnites, which are extinct cephalopods related to squids and octopi. The fossils were conveniently marked with blobs of white paint; I'm guessing that some geology class once visited this spot. We found a buffalo gourd plant along the edge of the wash, with fruits that look a bit like giant yellow ping-pong balls.

After we passed through the second narrows, my luck ran out. I pushed the group up into the foothills, thinking that we'd cut off a lot of distance on the way to the next gorge. This was a big mistake — instead of one drainage leading to the bottom of the gorge, we had to cross at least 3 washes. We had to go up and down steep, loose slopes; it was slow and unpleasant work, although the views were fairly nice. We took lunch within view of the mouth of the gorge.

I was full of optimism about the route, but a couple of turns into the gorge, we ran into a massive pour-off. Ouch.

On the way back, we once again cut through the foothills, but at a much lower elevation. There were handsome agave bushes and little yellow flowers, and the terrain was much more forgiving.

With a little time left after the hike, I decided to check out the Gold Butte town site, which I had never visited before. There's actually not that much to see; there is a small grave site and some broken down equipment. I was a bit surprised to see that the town site was in the granite country that I'd been introduced to in 2022.

go to the Garden Canyon photo gallery

The forecast for Saturday showed rain for the afternoon. I suggested that we could do the loop hike to the Kohta Circus rock art area. I've done this hike before, and it's a lot of fun, with some of the best rock art around. It was a short enough hike that we were able to get back to camp by lunchtime.

We got back out to I-15 at a good time. The rain started to fall just east of Mesquite, and after a break while I drove thorugh St George, it started roaring down on the climb to Cedar City. It came down so hard that I got worried about hydroplaning; I'm really glad that we didn't experience that downpour in Gold Butte.

go to the Kohta Circus photo gallery