Adventures in Onionism

We are technically not in Bryce Canyon National Park. We got up for hotel breakfast and picked up my package at the Post Office when they opened at 8. A little bit of pack shuffling, "Am I really going to eat these raisins?", waiting for my friend to send me her new address, her missing the cutoff, and me re-addressing the postcard to my brother after crossing out the one irrelevant sentence, and we were off.  We just walked Center Street west out of town until it became the Tropic Trail and brought us into the heart of Bryce Canyon. The guidebook HDT doesn't take you through the best part of Bryce, which is a little weird. I guess it would be difficult to make a continuous route (you'd either walk highway to Tropic, or you could skip Tropic, hike into the park in the middle and do a loop to the north to catch the best part). Nano had never seen any of it; I think this is my fourth time, but it's still awesome. We then headed south on the Under the Rim Trail. It w...

Woke up and got going a few minutes earlier than usual. Sheep Creek was sandy and not a ton of fun, as I had to keep scanning for any bits the horses hadn't yet pulverized in order to get decent footing and make forward progress in the sand. But it was only a few miles and over with relatively quickly. There was a bit of petroglyphs at the junction with Willis Creek, though there unfortunately seemed like more modern graffiti than ancient stuff. We dropped our packs and did a brief out and back excursion up Willis Creek to check out the narrows. Then we turned back and headed north again.  Pretty soon we reached the trailhead and the junction with Sketumpah(?) Road. We walked that until it hit pavement, and then quickly caught two rides to Tropic. We were in town by 11am or so. I found wifi, booked a hotel, and we spent the rest of the day writing postcards and eating. We stayed at the Canyon Villages; the room was fine, but the TV didn't have cable, so Nano again missed a chan...

Great day today. We walked a road for a mile or three in the morning, goofed around with a pair of walkie-talkies I found, and then dropped into the Pariah River and headed upstream all day. There was water the whole time, and it got cleaner and more plentiful as we went along. We saw petroglyphs, a very strong piped spring coming out of a crack in the cliffs, beautiful red cliffs, my first ever pine cone with pine nuts in it, and bear and coyote tracks. The walking was easy, unlike yesterday's sand. Toward the end of the day we turned off the Pariah into Sheep Canyon, and that became less great. Maybe an outfitter brings dozens of people here on horseback? Maybe the BLM just rounded up a herd of wild mustangs? Horse tracks the width of the canyon, and less and less water until it dried up completely. But we did finish our 20+ miles early enough that we got to do a side excursion up Bull Valley Gorge. The guidebook says it has some of the best narrows in the area. I misread "n...

Oh boy. Day started off wonderful. (Maybe I should write blog posts in the morning?) We descended into Round Valley Draw after walking next to it on a road for a few minutes, as it became a wonderful slot canyon. We had to lower our packs first to make the initial entrance descent, and one other time as well, but nothing too difficult. Sliding against sandstone on your butt would feel better in long pants though.  The slot lasted for a mile or two and then joined Hackberry canyon, which we were in for the rest of the day. It quickly became very sandy, and travel was very slow. There was never a ledge or dense strip or rocks or anything to get a decent step on, just soft and pliable sand. We took a lunch break at a spring that was supposed to have water, but the water didn't start until about a half mile later. Clearly the spring and the water underground was getting the sand wet, which for a brief, brief moment, provided relatively firm footing. But then the water was flowing, whic...

A road day but a good day, calloo, callay! Dirt road almost all day today. We climbed up Death Ridge Road (really) and got decent views of badlands-type hills (Mudhills?) from the top. We were deciding whether to follow Jamal's route across ridges to Headquarters Spring, but the ridges looked pretty nuts, so we just stuck to the road. The road did turn the wrong way a mile or two further off, but the descent down a wash was pretty easy. It was tight and brushy with juniper at the top but opened up lower and wasn't bad. The wash basically hooked us in with another road that took us to Grosvenor Arch. As soon as we hit that road, we started seeing a small handful of vehicles, and the majority of them, unprompted, slowed down and offered us water. The first guy to stop knew of Haydukers and was doing a paleontology dig nearby. So, water problem solved, it would seem. (He also said Headquarters Spring was probably dry.) Grosvenor Arch was nice, if a little diminished by car accessi...

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 en...

Stephens Canyon was dry when we hit the bottom, then dry and sandy, but then we had to avoid a dryfall on ledges, and the ledges were very fun. They looked narrow and super sketchy from afar but were easy up close. We had one more dryfall to avoid, and encountered some poison ivy, but not unbearable--we just put on long pants and long sleeves. Then we finished Stephens at the Escalante, which was awful--super brushy and muddy and the brush had thousands of aphids. But we only had to do one or two bends before climbing over a pass to Coyote Gulch and getting a great view of Stephens Arch. Coyote Gulch was pleasant and beautiful, but not epic like Stephens. Too crowded, and there's a ton of different use trails and muddy tracks and stuff. We saw maybe a dozen groups of backpackers. I'm glad others were out there to enjoy the cool flowing waters, large caves/grottos, and a few more arches (a 3 arch day!) but it would be great if BLM could try and confine the use to one single trai...