Starting in 2009, I made four annual trips, exploring the Behind-the-Rocks area just south and west of Moab. This area is full of fins and joints in Navajo sandstone, and navigating through it is really tough. It's also spectacular, with big walls and deep canyons, full of unusual topography. On each visit I worked out a new route, and it became apparent that in spite of the insanely difficult terrain, there might actually be a class 3 route through the maze from one side to the other that hit the highlights of all of my trips. I spent hours poring over maps and satellite photos and came up with a possible overall route. In 2012 I finally tried to put it all together, and we did succeed in crossing from Hidden Valley to Pritchett Canyon, but we ran out of time for the wonderful lower section and had to come out through an escape route in the middle of Pritchett.

Ten years later, I decided to try again. I figured that if I didn't need to spend as much time on routefinding, we could do the whole route in a day.

But first we had to battle the weather. The forecast for Friday kept getting wetter as the week wore on, going from a 20% chance of rain to a 40% chance and then to a 60% chance. On the drive down US 6 from Price, the rain and wind were brutal. My passengers, Hong and Bob, weren't excited about setting up tents in a muddy campground, and Hong used her phone to make motel reservations in Moab for the night.

When we arrived in Moab, there were heaps of hail in the gutters. After unloading Hong's and Bob's baggage at the motel, we drove to the reserved group campground in Kane Creek. I had warned some folks about the wet conditions by text, and a few of them had declined to come on the trip. Others showed up at the campground and set up tents in the mud. The campground had a couple of picnic tables under a shelter, and when the rain squalls passed through, we shivered under the roof. I managed to cook dinner in spite of all of this, and afterwards I drove Hong and Bob back to Moab. When I returned, there was another squall, and at the end of the squall the sun came out briefly and made a gorgeous rainbow.

go to the Kane Creek gallery

Saturday morning was cool but dry. I decided that we should prepare to do the long traverse hike, but be ready to bag it if the conditions at the start of the hike showed that it would be muddy and unpleasant. I let the starting time slide a bit, hoping that the landscape would dry out.

After leaving a shuttle vehicle and picking up Hong and Bob, we drove to the Hidden Valley trailhead. We hit the trail a bit after 9 AM. The Hidden Valley trail has been improved in the last 10 years, and it's much easier to follow now. We had fantastic views of the white-cloaked La Sals as we gradually climbed up to the Moab Rim. The trail was in fine condition, so after checking out some petroglyphs, we stepped off the trail and into the fins.

My memory of the route was actually pretty good, given that 10 years had passed. The scenery is still insanely gorgeous. We got to visit many beautiful overlooks and to admire the artistically stained Navajo sandstone walls. There was plenty of scrambling, and some of it was a bit challenging for class 3. The soil wasn't particularly muddy, although there were pools of water in places. I had managed to erase a lot of the bushwhacking from my memory, though, and we ended up in a few thrashes. It was chilly when passing clouds blocked the sun, but warm when the sun was out, so it was hard to decide what layers to wear.

The group did a great job of sticking together and helping everyone get through the tough spots. I was amused and a bit concerned at the notorious “5-foot drop” pour-off, though. As on every previous trip through here, everyone looked at the overhung drop and decided that it was too hard. I kept saying that it was just 5 feet, and that became a running joke for the rest of the trip. Eventually Hong volunteered to be lowered over the edge, and by standing next to the lip, she demonstrated that the drop was almost exactly 5 feet. After that, some people just jumped it, while we lowered others using muscle power.

I made my one major routefinding mistake shortly after. I managed to walk past the ramp that goes up to the final notch, and we ended bushwhacking down a narrow joint. Eventually I told people to wait while Gabe and I scouted the lower end, where I was forced to conclude that we were off track. We backtracked and quickly found the ramp. I got some fun photos of Connie and Hong in the notch, and we then descended the (much longer) ramp on the other side.

There were motorheads in Pritchett Canyon when finally reached the jeep track. We saw a couple of Jeeps with lift kits, which surprised me a bit, since the Pritchett track is in terrible condition — even dirt bikes have trouble on some parts of it. The BLM rates it a 9 out of 10 on its difficulty scale.

We made it back to the Kane Creek road at Pritchett in about 9 hours. That's really good time for this gnarly route. Everyone deserves a medal!

go to the Behind-the-Rocks gallery

Sunday morning was so lovely that we just had to do one more hike before leaving. I suggested Hunter Canyon, so we piled into shuttle vehicles and drove the short distance to the trailhead. It turned out that no one else on the trip had been there, which I found a little surprising since the canyon is close to Moab and it's absolutely wonderful. The trail is reasonably easy to follow, and it takes you past multiple arches and alcoves. A small stream runs through the canyon, and in the slickrock sections, it flows through curving water pockets and splashes over sandstone shelves. The cottonwoods were a glorious green, backlit by the morning sun. It was a fine send-off for a fine weekend.

go to the Hunter Canyon gallery

Last Thanksgiving, I left some chips on the table. (Hey, it's Nevada!) We ran out of time to do full justice to a really wonderful hike in the southwestern part of Gold Butte National Monument. (To be fully truthful, the hike is in the adjacent part of Lake Mead National Recreation Area, but accessed through Gold Butte). I decided that I'd collaborate with my friend Deborah, who came on that first attempt, and put a trip on the WMC schedule that would go the full distance, and add more fun hikes in the same area.

On Thursday March 17th, Hong and I drove down to St George and met up with Jim at the Costco gas pumps. Jim and Deborah then did the right thing and checked traffic on their cell phone apps, while I blithely drove with Hong into a 1-hour traffic jam between exit 118 and exit 112 on I-15 west of Mesquite. Urk. We finally hooked up and drove past the Bundy Ranch and Pyramid Bob's pyramid into Gold Butte.

We camped at the Connoly Wash corral, close to the end of the good part of the Cottonwood Wash road. I was ecstatic to get such a nice spot, so close to the hikes.

On Friday, we got an early start on the hike that ran out of time over Thanksgiving. We breezed up the burro trail to the saddle into Indian Hills Wash, then took our time heading downstream into the upper narrows. The ground was literally carpeted with flowers — it seemed to alternate between Coulter's lupine and a tiny yellow composite flower. The Mojave yuccas were in bloom, with spectacular cream and purplish inflorescences. The birds were also wonderful; Deborah and Jim pointed out the antics of the phainopeplas, little black birds with crests and white stripes on their wings. They can sit on a branch, suddenly shoot up and grab a bug, then return, making a lightning-fast loop.

We made good time through the upper narrows, then after a break of a mile, we entered what I had previously considered the lower narrows. This is all incredible territory, but I was really curious to know what came after the pour-off where we stopped in November. I knew that there was an easy way around that pour-off, but would there be a showstopper pour-off around the next bend?

The answer is “no.” There is a third set of narrows, the true lower narrows. The obstacles in it are all class 3, just as in the other narrows, so the entirety of this amazing canyon can be done without ropes or serious exposure. The walls remain tall and spectacular down into the Lake Mead high stand, where huge piles of driftwood show up. In fact, we had to clamber over one long pile that filled the canyon from wall to wall, which was a bit disconcerting.

After a while, we came out onto the dried-up mudflats which are the bed of (the former) Lake Mead. We bashed our way through dead tamarisk in search of the Colorado River, but that quickly grew tiring. We stopped for lunch on a knob of rock overlooking the “lake.” It sure would be nice if a flood would wash all the debris out of the bottom of the canyon, but if the weather were to be that wet, then the lake might come up again and drown it.

Unlike in November, we did see a few boot prints this time, proving that the canyon is not completely undiscovered. It still felt cool to have it all to ourselves, though.

go to the Indian Hills Wash gallery

On Saturday, we did a completely exploratory loop. The hike started from our campsite and went 0.3 mi north on the road to a very faint jeep track on the east side that descends into New Spring Wash. I was a bit surprised to see a concrete tank with water at the spring; I had assumed that it would be dry.

We then followed the wash downstream through an increasingly deep gorge. There are a couple of class 4-ish obstacles that can be passed on the south side, but otherwise it's pretty straightforward. The gorge exits into a broad valley and becomes Million Hills Wash. Million Hills Wash in turn has a short gorge of its own with a fun double arch at the top.

We continued down into the wide lower valley of Million Hills Wash until we got a view of the bottom of the Connoly Canyon gorge, our return route. It's pretty outrageous and hard to miss; we had lunch and admired it, and also admired the view down to the Colorado River gorge. A flock of hawks or turkey buzzards that was circling in the distance began to approach us, and I wondered whether we were on the menu, but we left before we could find out.

Connoly Wash is dramatic. I was expecting good scenery here, and it delivered even more than I'd hoped. There are two sections of exceptionally deep gorge, where steeply dipping sedimentary beds produce big walls that the gorge punches through. The terrain is so gnarly that I had a bit of trouble navigating — just go left at the first big fork, and right at the second one.

Once out of the gorge, it's still a long way back to camp. I was pretty relieved when we hit the Cottonwood Wash road again. But I was happy to have another beautiful day in the desert.

go to the New Spring Wash / Connoly Wash gallery

For Sunday, we decided to go to the granite country at the top of Cottonwood Wash. I had planned a loop; we left my 4Runner at the top of the loop, so that we wouldn't have to walk the road at the end of the hike. Instead, we walked down the rough road, past the starting point for the Indian Hills Wash hike, then picked up the rocky canyon that would take us into the hills on the west side of the road.

“Rocky” turned out to be an understatement. The wash was a narrow gorge that twisted its way over pour-offs and through huge boulder piles. It was very pretty, but the route-finding was so tough that it took us well over an hour to go a mile up the canyon. The next section involved a steep series of consecutive pour-offs, so I decided to pass it by going up the slope on the south side of the wash. That route was better but it was still pretty slow. When we reached the top, we discovered that it didn't just drop into the upper basin, and we had to go up and down through more boulders before we could drop in.

We were now finally at the foot of the granite peaks that we'd been looking at all morning from a distance. To make the loop work, we needed to cross the ridge just north of the northernmost peak, so we battled our way up the slabs and through the cat-claw acacia. Every time I thought that we were in range, another boulder-choked gully opened up and we had to work around it or through it. Eventually I spotted a relatively clear area below a knob at our level, and we scrambled our way there. We took a break for lunch and considered our options.

It was already 1 PM, and we had covered maybe 2.5 miles. At that rate, we'd be back to camp well after dark. I decided that we should give up on the loop and hunt for the jeep road in the basin to the north, then follow that back to the main Cottonwood Wash road. Although the terrain to the north wasn't quite as rocky and rugged as what we'd just come through, it still had challenges. Each little drainage leading to the basin was choked with brush and boulders. We kept contouring to the north, looking for an easier way down, when Deborah finally ran across an old bulldozer track.

The hike down the jeep road was much less stressful than the slog through the lovely but difficult granite slabs. There were huge tracts of gorgeous desert goldenpoppies, and grand views down to the puddle that was now Lake Mead. The bad news was that we had to hike a mile and a half back up the road to the vehicle, but I was grateful that we'd avoided getting stuck among the boulders.

go to the Cottonwood Wash gallery

My company forced all employees to take the entire week of Thanksgiving off this year. I was in the mood for some adventure, so I booked a WMC trip to southern Nevada, where I was hoping that the climate would be more agreeable than at home.

At one point I had 13 people signed up for the trip, but in the end, just 6 of us went. Only Bob and I went on all of the activities; other folks were present for different parts of the trip. It was fun to have a changing roster — new people and new conversation!

Hong and Gretchen wanted to follow me to the camp site, to avoid getting lost. I arranged for us to meet at the gas pumps at the Costco in St George. I was impressed to see a woman pumping gas while wearing a black down vest and beanie over her pastel green drop-waisted FLDS dress.

I had visited Mesquite in October and noted that there was construction on the I-15 bridge over the Virgin River just outside Beaver Dam AZ. On Saturday 11/20, we passed miles of northbound traffic backed up at the bridge; it made us very determined to avoid the bridge on Sunday 11/28 after Thanksgiving.

The road into Gold Butte National Monument between Bunkerville and Whitney Pocket is nominally paved, but the pavement so worn and full of potholes that dirt might have been better. The chip-seal is so eroded that the ancient pavement patches now protrude like traffic-calming bumps. It took us about an hour to drive the 21 miles into Whitney Pocket.

To my surprise, most of the camping loops around Whitney Pocket have now been furnished with port-a-potties. There were a fair number of people camped there; we found a loop that was occupied on one side of the port-a-potty, and we took the other side. The ground was mostly flat, with good dirt for tent stakes, and fantastic views of the sunrise and sunset. Around Thanksgiving, the sun rises at 6:15 AM PST and sets at 4:35 PM PST; we agreed to keep Utah time because dusk at 4:30 was just too hard to deal with. I brought my Coleman gas lantern and it was very useful for our evening get-togethers.

Speaking of evening get-togethers, the running joke of the trip was the bottle of Stella Rosa wine that Gretchen had bought on sale. Gretchen brought it out that evening, and to her dismay, she discovered that the wine was (a) only 5% ABV, (b) sparkling red, and (c) quite sweet. She shopped it around the table and no one could stand more than a taste. After that point, I kept expecting that Gretchen (or someone, anyone) would just pour it out on the sand and put it out of its misery, but instead it kept popping up at dinner times to surprise unwary newcomers. At one point I found the half-filled bottle in my own dining kit... Bob couldn't bear to dump the bottle, and it went home with him.

My 4Runner served as a 4WD bus on the trip. On Sunday morning, I hauled our group on a complicated route over rutted, sandy and rocky back roads to the upper end of the Nickel Creek gorge. Nickel Creek drains the scenic, cliffy basin on the north side of the Virgin Peak crest south of Bunkerville and Mesquite. It has a narrow gorge in its upper section that cuts through some pretty metamorphic rock.

I had visited the bottom end of the gorge back in January 2018 and found that it was too difficult for me to ascend, but it made me curious about the other end. This time, I navigated unsigned dirt tracks by GPS and ended up on a fairly terrible road into Nickel Creek just above the gorge.

The hike started out on a gravelly slope that funneled into the gorge, passing through clumps of narrowleaf cottonwoods, turning gold in the fall. When the streambed crossed onto the metamorphic rock, water came to the surface, first as a trickle and then as a chain of green pools in striped polished stone. Before long, the channel became steep, narrow and slippery, and we decided to turn around.

After returning to the 4Runner, I decided that it would be interesting to walk up the road into the upper basin. I wanted some good photos of the imposing limestone walls above us, but the low sun angle made it tough. The road here is very washed-out and rocky, but the scenery is pretty good.

The rocks in Nickel Creek were full of lovely patterns and crystals. Hong collected some great samples and loaded them into the 4Runner.

go to the Nickel Creek gallery

Our next stop on Sunday was the Falling Man petroglyph site. I had visited the site a couple of times before, but it's packed with rock art and I saw some new panels on this trip, along with many isolated glyphs. We had a blast just wandering around among the sandstone domes and exploring the nooks and crannies.

After spending more than an hour at Falling Man, we went over to the 21 Goats site, which has a fantastic panel with a chain of bighorn sheep [sic].

go to the Falling Man gallery

At dawn on Monday morning, we were roused by a crew who serviced the port-a-potty at our campsite. We were happy that the toilet was clean, a little less happy that we couldn't sleep in.

After breakfast, we went to the Kohta Circus petroglyph site. The trailhead is further down the same bumpy road as Falling Man and 21 Goats, but there is a steep hill and a washout before you reach the parking area. My recollection is that the hill used to have a nasty rut that restricted it to high clearance 4WD, but it appears to have been re-bladed and is now merely terrible rather than awful.

After starting up the sandy trail, it became clear that many people had driven around the signs and barriers that the BLM had erected to keep vehicles out. One set of tracks was so wide, they looked like Humvee tracks, trashing the vegetation on both sides of the former jeep road that we were walking on. Pretty stupid. The tracks stopped where the trail crossed a deep wash.

The trail follows the edge of an area of sandstone domes and canyons. Eventually it turns and drops into a canyon; the Circus panel is on a wall in a little side canyon. The Circus is an amazing, tightly packed assortment of all sorts of animals. Along with the usual bighorns, there are also people, deer, dogs, birds, snakes and tortoises.

Across the canyon from the Circus panel are more gorgeous panels, high up on a wall. We scrambled up as far as we could and got to see some very nice petroglyphs, but the best stuff requires some hairy exposure, so we admired it from a distance.

This is a fun area to explore. Hong and I went downstream through a mini-slot canyon, then went up a narrow joint that continued for a hundred yards or more. Bob and Gretchen checked out another joint system at the top of the draw that the Circus sits in. Using Google Maps, I had scoped out another joint system that looked like it might be an alternative route out of the Circus slickrock area, and we explored that area too, finding a somewhat circuitous route up to the top.

We walked back to the trail along the bases of cliffy sandstone domes, where Gretchen found plenty of agate / chalcedony flakes, discarded from the manufacture of stone tools. The flakes were quite pretty; we left them where we found them.

go to the Kohta Circus gallery

After a break at camp, we took off to visit Little Finland.

On the way there, we stopped at the Devil's Throat, a large sinkhole that formed in early 1900s. The site is a bit of an anticlimax — since the hole keeps getting wider and the edges are very unstable, the fence around the hole has been moved so far away from the edge that you can't actually see into the pit.

It was getting late in the day when we arrived at Little Finland. I had been there once before so I was in on the joke, but I think it didn't sink in for some people until we were on top of the cliff among the bizarre formations. The red light from the setting sun made the red blobs and holes look even stranger.

Cassie arrived that evening. She had originally planned to drive down on Saturday with the rest of us, but work stuff came up and she was delayed. She ended up flying from SLC to St George on Monday and renting a car, then driving the brutal road into Whitney Pocket. That takes real dedication!

go to the Little Finland gallery

I scheduled Tuesday for my big experimental hike to Indian Hills Wash.

Looking at Google satellite photos of Gold Butte, I had noticed a very interesting-looking canyon way down in the southeast corner, crossing into Lake Mead NRA. The canyon appeared to have some spectacular gorges cutting abruptly through tilted layers of rock. It also looked like it was in an area so remote that there was no human imprint on the landscape until you reached the lakeshore. A Google search didn't reveal any trip reports. I worked out an 11-mile round trip route from the nearest road. I was fascinated, and I had to check it out even if the route had obstacles that kept us from reaching the mouth of the canyon.

The hike was interesting enough to Deborah that she made the effort to join us at 6:40 AM Nevada time, leaving from St George and arriving at our camp just after sunrise. There's some more real dedication. Gretchen, on the other hand, left us for the day to hike on her own and then spend the night in Mesquite. (Hot showers!)

We drove from Whitney Pocket south to the Cottonwood Wash road. The road is reasonable inside Gold Butte NM — a bit rocky or sandy in a few places, but bladed and drivable by most vehicles. That changes abruptly when the road reaches the actual Cottonwood Wash and dips into Lake Mead NRA. The last ~3 miles to the trailhead are probably the worst that we drove on the entire trip. There are big boulders, steep hills, ruts and washouts; it's strictly for high clearance 4WD.

The start of the route is a draw that heads east off of Cottonwood Wash. It climbs moderately, then steeply, to the divide with Indian Hills Wash. There is lots of burro poop and many burro trails; the trails, when you can follow them, stay above the catclaw and boulders at the bottom of the draw.

On the other side of the divide, the slope is much gentler. We followed the drainage down through creosote and agave into a valley. The valley opens up again and flows toward a distinct dark wall. That's where the fun starts.

The limestone beds come out of the ground almost vertically here. The wash first punches through a brownish-orange wall, then appears to hit a dead end. At the last moment, it takes a hard swerve to the right and wriggles through impressive vertical beds in a narrows. There's a minor chokestone obstacle in the narrows, easy third class, which we passed without a problem. There are arches everywhere in this section. I think this is the spot where Deborah observed that the barrel cacti that fell from the cliffs and split open looked like durians.

After leaving this narrows, the streamcourse crosses another open area, then reaches a mountainous barrier. The stream runs north for almost a mile along this wall, then turns hard to the right again and enters a lower narrows. The lower narrows is deeper and longer than the upper narrows, and it has more obstacles. The obstacles once again turned out to be fairly straightforward class 3 scrambles.

Eventually we reached a pour-off. I decided that this was a fine place to have lunch and turn back, since I was worried that we could get back to the 4Runner after dark. I really didn't want to thrash through catclaw with headlamps, then drive the awful road in the dark. Deborah found a steep way to scramble around the pour-off and reported that the canyon just kept going. That motivated me to check for myself, and I found a class 2+ ramp on the left that completely avoided the hard part. At this point we were maybe 3/4 of a mile from the lakeshore in a spectacular gorge, and it was very tempting to push on, but I forced myself to turn the group around.

We actually made pretty good time on the way out, in spite of having to climb 2000+ feet, mostly on sand and loose gravel. We met a tarantula crossing the upper wash; Deborah got a fantastic photo. We got down to the 4Runner when there was still some sunlight on the mountain tops, and we made it back to camp while there was still a little light in the sky.

go to the Indian Hills Wash gallery

Deborah and Hong left us on Wednesday morning, so that they could be home for Thanksgiving. The rest of us packed up camp and headed into Mesquite to resupply. We met Gretchen there and convoyed over to the Buffington Pockets.

This area is about 50 miles west of Mesquite, in the northwestern part of the Muddy Mountains. Like Gold Butte, there are many exposures of red and buff Aztec sandstone (Navajo sandstone by another name), and lots of rock art. When we reached the area where I wanted to camp, the wind was brisk and chilly, so I hunted for a more sheltered spot and found one not too far away.

By the time we had set up camp, it was already late afternoon. (The sun went down around 4:30 PM Nevada time!) We still had enough time to walk into the Pockets from camp, however, so I organized a hike. We strolled up the awful road into the Pockets to an old concrete dam (which used to collect water for cattle?). Someone has creatively painted a huge image of an owl on the front of the dam, which makes it stand out. We went around the dam to look for the well-known petroglyph panel a short distance upstream. The panel turned out to be located next to a natural tank (with water!) in a short narrows. I'm not used to seeing petroglyphs in places like that, but I guess the artists had their own reasons for working there.

go to the Buffington Pockets gallery

Thanksgiving Day was dedicated to Valley of Fire State Park. We were camped off of the road to the western entrance to the park, so it was pretty straightforward to drive there.

The visitor center had Thanksgiving hours and didn't open until 10 AM, so we drove over to the Mouse's Tank trail. On the way we saw two bighorn sheep in the cliffs above the visitor center; what fun! I had misremembered the location of the best petroglyphs along the trail, but our detour didn't take long. By the time we returned to the trailhead, the parking lot had mostly filled up.

When we returned to the visitor center, not only had the parking lot mostly filled up, but there were two full busloads of tourists milling around. I tried to get a park brochure, but they were all out. By the time we left, the place was swarming with people; I was very impressed.

I had planned an exploratory hike into Fire Canyon, which is the central drainage of the southern section of the park. By some miracle we found a parking place at Silica Dome. From there, we walked east around the head of the basin on the Silica Dome trail, looking for cairns or other evidence that people had successfully descended through the cliffs. After a while we simply left the trail and wandered south onto the sandstone slabs on the east side of the draw. We contoured fairly high to stay above obvious pour-offs in the drainage, until Bob found a nice class 2+ crack that led down to a cairn in the bottom.

The soft sand in the bottom of the draw made hiking a bit of a slog, and there was plenty of catclaw. On the plus side, the canyon was narrow and colored a gorgeous shade of red. Like Indian Hills Wash, the obstacles were all fairly straightforward class 3. I think we could have easily made it down to where the wash leaves the domes, but we decided to turn around so that we'd have time to visit more of the park.

After returning to the 4Runner, we drove north to the White Domes area. The trailhead is at the end of the paved road, and it was very busy. We somehow managed to find a parking space, and we started hiking. Bob decided to do the class 4 scramble to the top of the dome on the east side of the parking lot, while the rest of us walked the loop around the west dome.

There was a bighorn traffic jam on the way back down to the park entrance. A ranger in a truck flashed his light rack at me, and I pulled to a sudden stop so that a herd of several bighorns could saunter across the road. Very cool — it's nice to see them bouncing back. On the drive back to camp, we passed an incredible number of cars that were still headed to the park, even though it was late in the afternoon. I had no idea that Valley of Fire was now so popular.

Back at camp, I made stovetop turkey tetrazzini as an experiment, using a smoked turkey breast that I had barbecued and frozen the previous week. It worked out very well, but I made so much that I ended up feeding myself, Bob and Cassie, and had enough leftovers for two more meals at home.

go to the Valley of Fire gallery

Cassie departed on Friday morning, leaving just me, Bob and Gretchen. I took our depleted group to two familiar places.

Hidden Valley is a huge bowl surrounded by the Muddy Mountains, with Aztec sandstone that forms walls and floors and domes and monoliths. We accessed it by walking up the outlet stream through a narrow limestone gorge, where monstrous fallen boulders occasionally block progress. The wide expanse of Hidden Valley is a bit of a surprise after the claustrophobic gorge.

In 2018, Nance and I had hiked up the gorge, then crossed the ridge to the north and descended through the Colorock Quarry, making a loop back to the car. This time, our little group spent hours exploring the maze of joints and cracks on the west side of the valley. We found flakes from the manufacturing of stone tools, as well as occasional rock art. The best panel was located in a little alcove along with the skull of a bighorn sheep.

It was very tempting to keep wandering, but we started to run out of water. We crossed the ridge to the Colorock area, where we found more rock art and flakes, not to mention fantastic rock staining reminiscent of wonderstone from Utah.

go to the Hidden Valley gallery

We had a bit of time left in the day, so I suggested that we drive the 30 miles to Arrow Canyon. Arrow Canyon is the defining feature of the Arrow Canyon Range, a rugged chain of peaks that parallels US 93 to the east as it heads north to Caliente and Ely. For some reason, the huge basin of Pahranagat Wash funnels through two narrow canyons in the Arrow Canyon Range to reach the Muddy River to the east. Arrow Canyon is the lower, eastern canyon.

In spite of the fact that I'd shot dozens of photos on an earlier visit, I couldn't resist taking more on this trip. We hiked past some really nice petroglyphs into the lower narrows, which was just as deep and slot-like as I'd remembered. Unlike my previous visit, this time we had plenty of company. The Southern Nevada Climbing Coalition has put up a sign at the trailhead, and the (small) parking area at the end of the (terrible) road was full. (Someone had managed to drive a Toyota Sienna minivan to the end of that road; I was (and am) amazed.)

We found climbers and bolted routes in the lower narrows. I remembered seeing climbers in the upper narrows on my previous visit; the lower narrows are taller and more intimidating, and I wasn't surprised that they are getting climbed. I still love the way that the barrel cacti on the walls defy gravity and stick out perpendicular to the slope.

We returned to camp after dark, sneaking past the “Trump 2020” encampment next to the Buffington Pockets road to reach our little camp. I made grilled ham and cheese sandwiches for dinner. The next morning we packed up and headed home, hoping to beat the traffic back to SLC.

go to the Arrow Canyon gallery

When I was considering places to go camping for Labor Day this year, high on my list of concerns was finding an area that was unlikely to be on fire. As it happens, the north slope of the Wind Rivers had a little pocket where the drought level was not extreme, unlike the rest of the West. To sweeten the deal, I had done a couple of solo hikes in the Fitzpatrick Wilderness back in 2003 and it looked like a pretty cool area. I put a trip on the WMC schedule and hoped for the best.

As the date approached, I got a bit worried about finding a campsite amid the Labor Day rush. I arranged to arrive on Thursday, so that I could nail down a site before the sites were all overwhelmed. Bob and I carpooled up from SLC on Thursday morning, and we managed to snag part of a a large camping area at the outlet of Trail Lake. We arrived just in time, because sites filled up rapidly, and our own site was visited many times by people looking for a place to camp.

The site was located on a ridge about 50 feet above the water and it had a lovely view. Bob and I erected his canopy and as the afternoon went on, all of the other participants showed up. A storm also showed up, with some wind and rain around dinnertime. It quieted down before bedtime, with blue sky filling in from the southwest.

A couple of hours later, a huge storm crashed into the area, with lighting, thunder, downpours, ferocious wind — the works. I huddled in my tent and tried to get some sleep, realizing that all of the gear that we'd set up was going to blow away. I couldn't persuade myself to go out into the rain and wind to salvage the gear.

In the morning, Bob's canopy was a mangled mess. My tables and benches and camp chair were scattered around the site. Bob and Stanley disassembled the cold, wet remains of the canopy frame and piled it in a heap next to a big rock.

There was a little good news — the weather was clear and calm. I decided that we could do the Bomber Falls hike, up the East Fork of Torrey Creek to a 600-foot cascade, and then on to the top of the falls for a view up the next section of the canyon. The trails were muddy and full of puddles, but we were (mostly) spared from sloshing through thick wet vegetation. We started out on the Glacier Trail, which climbs a few switchbacks and then crosses to the east side of Torrey Creek on a bridge above an impressive gorge with many waterfalls and cascades. We followed the trail up over glacier-polished slabs and traversed into the valley of the East Fork. The trail alternated between meadow and forest, and we got some nice views of Bomber Basin below the falls, and eventually got a distant view of the falls themselves.

At this point we came across a sign pointing left to the Glacier Trail. I was hoping to see an official sign pointing to the Bomber Falls trail; instead, the sign had scratches on it pointing to the right to “BOMBER” and a faint trail through a meadow. My instincts failed me at that point — I decided to follow the main trail instead and look for an “official” trail junction. Oops. We ended up thrashing down a slope through deadfall to reach the “BOMBER” trail that I had cavalierly ignored.

Once we were back on the correct trail, it was much easier going. We did lose the track in a swampy spot next to a big gray bluff above the creek, but we picked it up again after crossing a talus pile. We met Greg as he came back from scouting the falls area. We followed him to the base of the 600-ft knob that the creek pours over. He and Bob elected to cross a talus field to try to find the base of the falls, while the rest of us went up the steep trail to the top of the knob. The trail goes up and down and sideways, like playing Chutes and Ladders. It's not too hard to follow if you look for cut logs and account for deadfall, but it could use some improvement.

When we reached the top, we decided that we would try to get a view down to the falls. We contoured around the west side of the knob on wet rock, made very slippery by mushy lichen. We were able to inch close to the edge for a view down — the falls roared down through a narrow gorge just below us. We started to have lunch, but then realized that it might be less windy near the top of the knob, where we had already agreed to meet Greg and Bob.

Naturally Greg and Bob were already there. We lounged around on the rock, finding nooks that protected us from the wind and exposed us to some sun. I admired the seriously special view up the canyon, with sunlight glittering off wet granite slabs. After a while, I noticed some different glittering through the trees on the other side of the creek — we had spotted the bomber wreckage, about a hundred yards up from the top of the falls.

The story goes that on August 14, 1943, a B24E bomber was on a training run from Pocatello with eight crew members. It was seen turning up Torrey Creek. Apparently it couldn't quite clear (what is now) Bomber Falls, but even if it had managed to get above the falls, it certainly couldn't have made it out of the canyon. The locals saw a forest fire, and found the wreckage when they responded. The cascade has been known as “Bomber Falls” ever since.

Back in camp, I noticed a huge osprey nest in a tree on the other side of the Trail Lake outlet. One osprey was perched on a nearby branch that bounced around in the wind, while another one was busy with something in the nest. The nest was so deep that both birds could disappear into it, and sometimes we could just see heads or wings bobbing above the rim. It looked like they were busy on some important secret project. Watching the ospreys was a fun pastime in camp.

go to the Bomber Falls gallery

For Saturday, I had originally planned an insane cross-country loop up the West Fork of Torrey Creek from Lake Louise to Ross Lake. The area is gorgeous, but it's so rugged that it probably would have taken us all day just to get halfway through the route. The clincher was the soggy lichen that we were slipping on on Friday — I didn't want to expose our group to exposed scrambling on the wet granite.

So instead we took the trail to Ross Lake. It's a 12-mile out-and-back hike that avoids the scrambling by staying high on sandstone ledges, only dropping down when approaching the lake. The route starts out on the Whiskey Mountain Trail, climbing from the Glacier Trailhead to a junction at 10,200 ft. The switchbacks aren't particularly steep, but they seem to go on forever. The scenery is excellent — there are fantastic views out over the Torrey Creek drainage, and closer in, the cliffs and forest are also very nice. We could see the Continental Divide ahead of us, with its distinctive uniform arc (the old erosional surface after the Laramide Orogeny that originally built the Rocky Mountains).

When we reached the junction with the cut-off trail to Ross Lake, a chilly wind was blowing hard. A couple folks decided that they'd had enough, so after lunch in the sheltering trees, we split up, with some of us soldiering on and the others heading back down. I put on multiple layers of wind protection, which predictably I then took off 10 minutes later.

The trail runs through alternating meadows and forest with gentle ups and downs. Eventually we reached a long meadow with a small pond in it, overlooked by a huge pile of rocks that reminded me of a grandstand. At that point, the trail cuts sharply to the south and descends on steep, rocky switchbacks. We stopped in multiple places to admire the view. After wandering through a delightful woodland, the trail pops out near the north end of Ross Lake.

Ross Lake is surrounded by amazing cliffs and towers cut out of the granite. There is basically no place to camp at the lake — the terrain is granite slabs and talus piles. This was going to be a problem for the multiple groups of backpackers that we encountered. Their dogs were very friendly; at least the dogs wouldn't have much trouble sleeping on the bare rocks. We did see a handful of places to camp along the trail below the switchbacks, none of them close to the water.

While I was wheezing my way back up the switchbacks, Greg came out at the top and encountered a couple of black bears. They were unsociable and camera-shy. I hope the backpackers didn't run into them at night.

On the hike back, the air got clearer and clearer. The smoke got pretty much completely blown out, and the views were spectacular. We could even see the Absaroka Range across the Wind River Valley to the north.

At the trailhead I had to inflate a tire on my 4Runner; that turned out to be a bad omen.

go to the Ross Lake gallery

I got some pushback against doing a big hike on Sunday. Instead, I put together a few shorter adventures.

In the morning, we went to look at petroglyphs. We heard from other folks that there were cool petroglyphs spread out all along the Trail Lake road, and specifically that there were some very nice ones right across the Trail Lake Road from our campsite. I had done a short recon to our local petroglyphs on the previous morning, and I led the group around to the highlights.

The petroglyphs were exquisitely weird and detailed. Some people wondered if the petroglyphs could be very old if they were so sophisticated; however, you could see lichen covering parts of some petroglyphs, so I'm guessing that the petroglyphs are in fact pretty old. A number of the petroglyphs looked vaguely like animals or human figures, but some of the big ones were impossible for me to categorize. Your guess is as good as mine — take a look at the photos and see what you think.

We then piled into our carpooling vehicles and headed for the trailhead, to hike to Lake Louise. Lake Louise is probably the most popular (and shortest) day hike destination from the Glacier trailhead. The trail is surprisingly erratic and poorly graded given its popularity, but that adds to the fun. We hiked across bare rock and through forest, next to some impressive waterfalls and cascades. Occasionally we had to follow cairns across the slabs. There was a massive logjam on the cascade just below the lake, which made some of us wonder if the logs would work as a bridge to get across the creek.

The trail ends at some boulders on the far eastern shore of the lake. We had lunch and enjoyed the awesome view. The lakeshore is quite cliffy in places; we watched people working around a cliffy section on the far shore. It looked like a tough route to take without getting wet. On our (north) side, the cliffs also dropped into the water; however, we could see people camped on the far side of the cliffs, so there was obviously a way to get there.

We were curious, so we decided to do a little bit of my crazy scrambling route. Greg led us up onto the granite dome to the north, then down steep slabs to a brushy draw, which we descended to the campsite. The campers were in the process of pulling down their camp. It turned out that some of the people at the camp had hiked over the slabs, some had waded, and some took a packraft ferry (!).

We walked over to the narrow strait that divides the eastern bay from the main part of Lake Louise. The shoreline gets steep again here, not quite a cliff. It looked to me like there was a class 3 route around the obstacles but it was hard to tell whether it went very far.

Stanley climbed up on some boulders to check it out. It was tempting to go further, but some folks in the group wanted to head back and I didn't want us to get separated when going cross-country, so we turned around. The slabs were an absolute blast on the hike back. We were having so much fun that we walked right past the trail and didn't realize it, and had to backtrack.

On the way back down the trail, we bumped into a small group with a big and playful Irish wolfhound. One guy was wearing a kilt. Yi asked him whether he was wearing anything under the kilt, and he cheerfully demonstrated that he was not. Some things you only see on Labor Day weekends.

Stanley's truck had at least one low tire now, as did Michelle's Subaru. All of us but Greg drove into Dubois (DOO-boyce, pop 971) to get gas and inflate tires. After visiting the gas station, we walked around the business district, such as it is. There is a boardwalk on both sides of the main street with people's names carved into it. A western wear shop was undergoing a bank-organized liquidation sale; Michelle and Bob tried on boots, but didn't buy anything. We stopped at the honey shop, which had zillions of different containers of honey, collected from hives all around the Wind River valley.

Back at camp, Rick and Reba came over to visit. Rick had been camping near us in a very rustic truck camper, and Reba was his 14-year-old border collie mix. Rick had worked for the Forest Service and other organizations in the Winds for 20+ years, and he had some fun stories about living in Wyoming and hiking in the backcountry with his “pack” of dogs. He's not a fan of wolves, but he did have some interesting experiences with grizzlies and moose. The next morning, he was taking off up the Glacier Trail to see if he could find the spot where he had met Bigfoot.

As for us, we packed up and joined the holiday traffic back to Utah. The smoke was thicker on Monday, and I was really happy that we'd had a few clear days in Wyoming.

go to the Lake Louise gallery