Start: Hotel in Hanksville
Finish: East side of Henry Mountains
Daily Mileage: 8.1
Trip Mileage: 252.5
Elevation gain/loss: 1889/295ft
I finished my town chores in the morning and reorganized my gear. Then I had some time to kill. I didn’t want to get on the trail early because I only wanted to approach to the Henry Mountains and camp to set myself up to cross them tomorrow. Since I’ve seen them covered with snow the past couple days approaching them, I didn’t want to spend a night up high when I didn’t have to.
I had lunch at the grill, completing my tour of all 3 of Hanksville’s restaurants. I got a burger wrapped up to go, and Dan from Outlaws gave me a ride back to the trail. I arranged that last night since there isn’t much traffic on the road back to the trail.
Back on the trail, I could have chosen to just walk to the other side of the highway, but there was a large culvert under the highway, so I obviously walked through that under the road instead. Got to stay classy. On the other side of the highway, I quickly linked up with an old 4×4 track, which I followed for a while, very gradually climbing towards the Henrys.
I eventually turned off the 4×4 track and had to get down into a gully to follow a wash for a while. There might have been an easy way to get into the gully if I went backward a little bit, but who wants to do that? So instead, it looked like I could get in further up, so I followed the rim of the gully to that point. Once I got there, though, it appeared a bit sketchy. I went down anyway, and when going down, one water bottle popped out and flipped all the way down to the wash. I got down to the wash, and it actually took me a few minutes to find the water bottle since it had gone behind a rock and was in shadow, hiding from me. But the bottle is still intact and perfectly fine. I’ve used PowerAde bottles for a long time for my water bottles, and they haven’t failed me yet. I’m not sure a more delicate bottle would have survived that fall.
I headed up the shallow gully for a while before I met up with another 4×4 track. I followed it briefly and it was climbing. I didn’t want to climb too much since that would just mean lower temperatures overnight, so I found a stand of juniper trees and located a spot beneath a tree that was clear and flat to pitch my tent. It looked like this had definitely been an old cowboy camp since there were the coils from an old mattress nearby and some cowboy debris. It seemed like it was going to be a pretty cold night, so I buttoned everything up and went to bed.
