Start: Just outside Arches National Park
Finish: Moab Hotel
Daily Mileage: 14.8
Trip Mileage: 26.3
Elevation gain/loss: 1598/1558ft
We recovered from our first-day soreness overnight and got up early because we planned to do a longer day today to get into Moab. We broke camp and continued navigating cross-country across a bunch of slickrock hills. I really like cross-country travel; just finding the best, most efficient course and navigating to where you need to go. It’s a fun challenge and makes me think while I’m hiking a lot more than just blindly following a trail.
For only the second time we briefly rejoined the official Hayduke Trail along a fence line where we saw the footprints of single male hiker. There is absolutely no reason that a regular hiker would be where we were so I assumed that he was another Hayduke hiker. We followed the fence line and did another alternate where we went down a wash (dry creek bed) instead of the official route.
The wash was really scenic with lots of sandstone worn away over the eons by the periodic water flow, and we found a puddle in the wash where we refilled our water for the first time of the trip. I think this trip will have a lot of water sources that are puddles. I normally wouldn’t touch a water source like that but out here there isn’t going to be much running water, so you have to make do with what you find. As we were leaving the water source, we scared a big buck and he ran away before we could get a picture. Some more cross-country travel and we are getting towards Courthouse Wash. The wash we were traveling down got narrow in places with more potholes filled with water and we had to get a little creative to get past some of them and stay dry, scrambling with tricky hand and foot placement.
When we were almost to Courthouse Wash, the wash we were following dumped into a huge, wet pothole. There was no way to get around it and we didn’t know how deep it was, so we decided to escape our wash and find an adjacent one to descend to Courthouse Wash on. It took a little poking around and looking at a couple places that were too steep to safely descend before we found a moderate decent that didn’t look too dangerous to go down. That brought us to Courthouse Wash which was wet and flowing.
The wash was extremely brushy and we had the choice of either walking straight down the stream or pushing through brush which was packed with debris from previous flash floods and beaver activity. That made the going really difficult. We initially tried walking down the stream since that was generally clear of brush and shallow, but we quickly discovered why that was a difficult option after Kate had to stick out her hiking pole to help haul me out of some quick sand. You could just be walking along the stream in ankle deep water, and all of the sudden you were up to your knee where the apparent solid stream bed was just a mirage. After that, we were more cautious and figured out how to read the stream for quick sand a little better, but it was still not fool-proof and we still ended up with a quick sand surprise occasionally.
We tried just pushing through the brush, and while I was ok with that, it took Kate a long time to make her way through and she made it obvious that she didn’t enjoy it.
After slogging through cart house wash for just over a half-mile, bouncing between thick brush and the quick sand laden stream, I could tell that Kate was really not having a good time. I could have continued on, but it wasn’t fun for me either though I could have made it work. I offered to Kate that we could climb back up to the rim of the canyon and follow it downstream until we were able to descend back to the wash where travel looked more reasonable. I did have some waypoints I had downloaded where it was marked as potential descent points into the canyon, but I didn’t have any information other than the waypoints to know if they would go.
It didn’t take Kate too long to decide that she wanted to ascend the canyon wall and get the heck out of the wash. We found a spot to scramble out of the canyon, and we escaped to the high rock plateau which Courthouse Wash ran through.
The plateau was beautiful and we got to look down into Courthouse Wash which was quite scenic and had vertical walls most of the way. We wouldn’t necessarily have seen this view if we were just charging through the water and brush of the wash. We enjoyed walking on the rim of the canyon just looking down into it and forward for the grand views over the entire wash.
But then we started to wonder; with all these vertical walls, will we be able to get back into this canyon to continue on our route? I looked at my topo maps and there were a few places the contours widened where we could potentially drop back into the canyon. I also had some waypoints from another hiker for where it might be possible to enter the canyon again but I didn’t have any information other than the waypoints, and did not know if they were proven or theoretical routes.
We continued along the rim, going out to the edge frequently to look down, but the walls remained vertical. We went to a couple spots that looked promising from the topo map but they were vertical and impossible to descend. At this point the heat was starting to get to us, baking on the high plateau bare rock with no cover. We did find a few potholes up there so we had water but the heat was still getting to us. After we went to and dismissed the last waypoint as too risky to descend, we had thoroughly exhausted our options to get back into Courthouse Wash, and we started trying to figure out how we were going to get off this plateau. There were a couple other areas where it looked like we could get back down to the park road on the opposite side of the plateau, and we decided those were our only options as we didn’t have enough time to go back to reenter Courthouse Wash where we left it. This would drop us far from our route, but we didn’t have other options at this point.
After bailing on Courthouse Wash and making our way across the bright, hot plateau, we started looking at places where we may be able to get down. We struck out a couple more times where we might have gotten down, but the drop was steep enough we couldn’t tell if it would go. So, we kept going until eventually the park road came up near the plateau and we were finally able to scramble down and across the last stretch of desert to finally reach a destination.
We were exhausted by the time we got to the park road and stuck at our thumbs to get a hitch. Only a few cars went by before a couple in a Mustang coupe stopped and offered us a ride. It’s funny how it’s never the big spacious vehicles that stop and they had to move quite a bit of stuff around to make us fit but we were glad they stopped and to get in the air-conditioned car.
However, our odyssey wasn’t over. The Mustang wasn’t going to Moab, it was going the opposite direction. They dropped us off at the visitor center and we figured we could call a taxi and get a ride. However, the taxi service was fully booked and Lyft and Uber didn’t have any drivers. The hotel wouldn’t pick us up because they only had one person at the desk, though they suggested we call the sheriff and ask for a ride back. Not willing to try that immediately, we headed to the highway and stuck out of thumbs once again. This was a harder hitch being on a busy road even though we strategically stationed ourselves with a good place for a car to stop and I had the advantage of hitching with a woman. It was probably 20 minutes before the ever-reliable Subaru with a roof rack stopped and gladly offered a ride wherever we wanted to go. We made it to our hotel and went to a smoke house for a big pile of meat, unhealthy sides, and beer of course.
