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ilanaramaPart 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
The next morning we drove through weird lunar-landscape dirt cliffs and pillars to Hanksville (where we got a brief cell signal and were able to download email) and then turned south toward Hite and the very edge of Lake Powell. Or rather, what used to be the edge of the lake, since the past decade-plus of drought has dropped the water level so much that the Dirty Devil River (what the Fremont becomes after merging with Muddy Creek) and the Colorado are now free-flowing again, with tall silt banks. We stopped at the Hite Marina overlook and it was pretty pathetic to see the marina high and dry above the now-river. We remembered rafting Cataract Canyon (on the Colorado) in the mid-1990s and coming out onto the lake to be met by a powerboat who towed our group's rafts for several miles to Hite; now we could see a new river take-out on river right, and even a group of rafts pulling in there to end their trip.
(If you look at the lower left of the second photo, you can see the trees along the edges of what used to be a braided stream channel, which is in the lower right of the first photo. The concrete slab in the center of the first photo is the old boat ramp!)
We stopped on the high bridge over the Colorado to look down at the river, and then again on the bridge over White Canyon. On previous trips we'd looked down the steep, narrow gorge, and had talked about hiking its slot canyon, which is famous for the "Black Hole" in its dark depths, filled with icy water that must be swum through (and so people do this in midsummer when it's 100+ degrees, not normally the time for Utah desert hiking). Britt had wanted to stop at the canyon access and try to hike a little up or down it, but when we passed a dirt road with a sign saying "White Canyon/Lake Powell" I suggested we turn in and hike up from the bottom instead.
This turned out to be a great hike. We parked on a bench above an easy scramble into the wide wash and then we hiked on the sand as the walls grew and closed in.
We passed many beautiful side canyon slots, some very much worth the short exploration:
The floor of the canyon was often very beautiful fluted sandstone, pink and yellow, shaped by the floods over the years. After an hour we hit some pools and rock jumbles we had to scramble around, and deep narrows filled with water that we could luckily avoid by taking higher benches. It was slow going and I slipped on some sand and wrenched my upper arm, not badly but enough to make it quite sore. (I took a couple of ibuprofen and soldiered on!)
After nearly two hours we came to the bridge, soaring high above us; we grinned and congratulated ourselves, then turned around. We picked our way back through the obstacles, though we found an easier way around one set of pools so it was faster going back. We exited the canyon at a cairn a bit earlier than our entrance, and scrambled up to the rim where we struck out cross-country to the road and our van.
We then drove past the access point for the "Black Hole" narrows and continued to the next spot where White Canyon can be entered, a place called Duckett Crossing. (White Canyon is very long and has few crossing places.) Since it was by now 5pm we took the very weird crossing (it's a right-hand exit that then curves and goes through an extremely narrow tunnel under the highway, then climbs up on a 4WD road) up to the white sandstone benches above to find a place to camp for the night.
In the morning, after an exploratory hike to see if we could get into White Canyon directly from our camping spot by climbing down a side canyon (we got to a point where we couldn't see if it was possible or not, so we backtracked) we drove back down to the actual Duckett Crossing and hiked downcanyon into White Canyon. We were hoping to make it to Fortknocker Canyon, partly because it looked interesting on the topo map in one of our guidebooks, partly because we looked up its unusual name in our copy of Steve Allen's Canyon Country Place Names (a ridiculous two-volume hardback set which we nonetheless tote around in our van because it's got so many interesting stories) and it turns out to have been originally named Fartknocker Canyon, with three possible (and apocryphal) origin stories about horses and/or men falling there and "getting the fart knocked out of 'im", but expurgated for the official maps. We did not make it that far, but it was still a scenic and interesting hike.
We retraced our steps to the van and had lunch, then hiked White Canyon in the other direction, toward an area called the Grotto. We didn't find anything that looked grotto-like, but we did find a wall carved into many little niches, and two lovely arches.
Duckett Arch is a bit hard to see, but it's right in the middle of this photo:
Big Arrowhead Arch photographed better, with blue sky behind it:
From there it was not quite four hours' drive home, reminding us once again that this astonishing scenery is really not so very far away, and we should get out and explore it more often! (Though probably not until spring gnats and summer heat go away - maybe we'll be back this fall!)
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
The next morning we drove through weird lunar-landscape dirt cliffs and pillars to Hanksville (where we got a brief cell signal and were able to download email) and then turned south toward Hite and the very edge of Lake Powell. Or rather, what used to be the edge of the lake, since the past decade-plus of drought has dropped the water level so much that the Dirty Devil River (what the Fremont becomes after merging with Muddy Creek) and the Colorado are now free-flowing again, with tall silt banks. We stopped at the Hite Marina overlook and it was pretty pathetic to see the marina high and dry above the now-river. We remembered rafting Cataract Canyon (on the Colorado) in the mid-1990s and coming out onto the lake to be met by a powerboat who towed our group's rafts for several miles to Hite; now we could see a new river take-out on river right, and even a group of rafts pulling in there to end their trip.
(If you look at the lower left of the second photo, you can see the trees along the edges of what used to be a braided stream channel, which is in the lower right of the first photo. The concrete slab in the center of the first photo is the old boat ramp!)
We stopped on the high bridge over the Colorado to look down at the river, and then again on the bridge over White Canyon. On previous trips we'd looked down the steep, narrow gorge, and had talked about hiking its slot canyon, which is famous for the "Black Hole" in its dark depths, filled with icy water that must be swum through (and so people do this in midsummer when it's 100+ degrees, not normally the time for Utah desert hiking). Britt had wanted to stop at the canyon access and try to hike a little up or down it, but when we passed a dirt road with a sign saying "White Canyon/Lake Powell" I suggested we turn in and hike up from the bottom instead.
This turned out to be a great hike. We parked on a bench above an easy scramble into the wide wash and then we hiked on the sand as the walls grew and closed in.
We passed many beautiful side canyon slots, some very much worth the short exploration:
The floor of the canyon was often very beautiful fluted sandstone, pink and yellow, shaped by the floods over the years. After an hour we hit some pools and rock jumbles we had to scramble around, and deep narrows filled with water that we could luckily avoid by taking higher benches. It was slow going and I slipped on some sand and wrenched my upper arm, not badly but enough to make it quite sore. (I took a couple of ibuprofen and soldiered on!)
After nearly two hours we came to the bridge, soaring high above us; we grinned and congratulated ourselves, then turned around. We picked our way back through the obstacles, though we found an easier way around one set of pools so it was faster going back. We exited the canyon at a cairn a bit earlier than our entrance, and scrambled up to the rim where we struck out cross-country to the road and our van.
We then drove past the access point for the "Black Hole" narrows and continued to the next spot where White Canyon can be entered, a place called Duckett Crossing. (White Canyon is very long and has few crossing places.) Since it was by now 5pm we took the very weird crossing (it's a right-hand exit that then curves and goes through an extremely narrow tunnel under the highway, then climbs up on a 4WD road) up to the white sandstone benches above to find a place to camp for the night.
In the morning, after an exploratory hike to see if we could get into White Canyon directly from our camping spot by climbing down a side canyon (we got to a point where we couldn't see if it was possible or not, so we backtracked) we drove back down to the actual Duckett Crossing and hiked downcanyon into White Canyon. We were hoping to make it to Fortknocker Canyon, partly because it looked interesting on the topo map in one of our guidebooks, partly because we looked up its unusual name in our copy of Steve Allen's Canyon Country Place Names (a ridiculous two-volume hardback set which we nonetheless tote around in our van because it's got so many interesting stories) and it turns out to have been originally named Fartknocker Canyon, with three possible (and apocryphal) origin stories about horses and/or men falling there and "getting the fart knocked out of 'im", but expurgated for the official maps. We did not make it that far, but it was still a scenic and interesting hike.
We retraced our steps to the van and had lunch, then hiked White Canyon in the other direction, toward an area called the Grotto. We didn't find anything that looked grotto-like, but we did find a wall carved into many little niches, and two lovely arches.
Duckett Arch is a bit hard to see, but it's right in the middle of this photo:
Big Arrowhead Arch photographed better, with blue sky behind it:
From there it was not quite four hours' drive home, reminding us once again that this astonishing scenery is really not so very far away, and we should get out and explore it more often! (Though probably not until spring gnats and summer heat go away - maybe we'll be back this fall!)