House Range 2019

Jerry Hatch and I scheduled an October trip to Notch Peak again this year, but no one else showed up at the meeting place, so we took the opportunity to try some new things.

I had worked out a loop hike in the granite country in Miller Canyon, just north of Sawtooth Canyon where the Notch Peak hike starts. I wanted to go back to the area that had defeated our group in 2017, and try a different route. I've decided to call the area Utopia Canyon, after the “Utopia” mining claims posted along the (very faint) trail. The route starts on a steep and rocky dirt road at the Klondike Mine in Contact Canyon. The road ascends the north slope from an adit across from the mine's headframe. At the top of the ridge, go west (left) to a beat-up mining claim sign just below a granite outcrop. Look carefully for a trail tread that sidles around the outcrop on the north (right) slope. The trail continues to the west, first losing a bit of altitude, then angling up the slope into a little draw, where a “Utopia” claim is posted on a tree. The trail is never very distinct, and it fades away completely in this draw, but if you angle your way up to the ridge on the south / left side, you'll pick it up again on the ridge top. Go west along the ridge top until you run into another outcrop, at which point the trail breaks off the ridge to the south / left. Follow it up a west-trending draw. At the head of the draw, there are broken boards that may be the remains of a lean-to, and a broken wooden table, along with another claim sign.

This is the end of the trail. It's a pretty spot, in a forest that mixes piñon pine with aspen and a few white firs. A stream magically runs all year round in the valley on the far (north) side, just 30 yards down the hill. From here onward, it's cross-country travel.

In 2017 our group tried heading upstream, staying on the north side of the stream. This route soon enters a thicket of head-high rose bushes (ouch) and other brush. We made an attempt to climb up to the ridge to the north, in the hope that we'd escape the brush, but that just put us on a steep scramble over big granite boulders, which wasn't any better. We turned tail without reaching the ridge.

This year, I did some research with Google Maps' satellite view, and I realized that the USGS map is wrong — if you head downstream, the stream goes northeast over a waterfall, rather than southeast into Contact Canyon. You can contour into a side canyon that leads west from the waterfall, and I thought that it might just provide a route up to the big granite domes that sit between Utopia Canyon and Water Canyon.

Alas, it turns out that the side canyon is just as brutal a bushwhack and scramble as the main canyon. It's filled with a jumble of boulders that range in size from sedans to school buses, with brush in between them (including more wild rose). If we had been (much) more ambitious about scrambling, I think we could have made it up to the ridgeline, but it would have taken hours. We beat a retreat.

With time left in the day, I took Jerry to see the locally-famous sinkhole on the alluvial fan in North Canyon, just a few miles north of Miller Canyon. It's still very startling — the gravel at the edge looks like it ought to just crumble and send you flying into the hole, but it's actually fairly well cemented. The hole is supposed to be 90 feet deep, but it looks bottomless until your eyes adjust to the light.

We headed back to Delta, where we spent 2 hours in the amazing Topaz Museum. I highly recommend the experience, which is disturbing and inspiring in equal measure.

go to the House Range gallery