Sep 23: Some dirt road south out of Escalante

D wasn't up for giving us a ride back down 35 (70 roundtrip) washboard miles of Hole in the Rock Road, so our choices were to try and hitch, or just walk out of Escalante. We went for the latter. A major concern was water, and we couldn't quite figure that out. Buck30 says it's bad, but Jamal says it's good. I think it's actually going to be pretty bad, but there are a couple places where we'll probably see tourists, so we will try and yogi water from them. The calculus was that this route was guaranteed (no waiting for a ride), shorter by as much as 40 miles, which should allow us to spend more time in Bryce, and the official route didn't seem to have must-see stuff. I don't think the official trail sees much (any?) of Bryce, and Mike has never been, so that seemed like an obvious choice. I've done Under the Rim, but it's worth repeating. So after 35 miles or so we'll hook into mile ~70 of this section of the Hayduke, but then on the tail end we'll add at least 20 miles back by walking off the Hayduke to Tropic to resupply and then see some of Bryce.

Speaking of Bryce, why does this trail go from Bryce to the Grand Canyon and then back to Zion rather than Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon? Look at a map. It's way more direct. Is the scenery better? Especially now that the weeping wall trail at Zion is done for, ending at Grand Canyon seems that much better.

Back to reality: we got our packages from the PO, packed up, ate lunch, and headed out. The outfitter didn't have 2.5L Platy bladders, but D had one he gave me--I needed to replace the one that spring a leak. I sent my umbrella home because I wasn't using it, and gave up on a second long sleeve I hadn't worn since the second day. D drove us to the end of the pavement at the edge of town, and we walked 10 or so boring cow dirt road miles, but the sunset was nice and we had fun chatting, despite the 8L of water and 6 days of food each.