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Hayduke Trail Day 9

Yeti — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 01:18:04 +0000

Start: Salt Creek Backcountry Campsite 4

Finish: Sweet Alice “Road”

Daily Mileage: 25.2

Trip Mileage: 150.1

Elevation gain/loss: 4234/1029ft

I slept fitfully last night but got up at the usual time to get into the Anasazi ruins. The trail starts off as it had been so far, overgrown and brushy, but around where the ruins started it really opened up.

The trail went on to wide planes that were slightly above salt Creek and pretty much went from ruin to ruin. There were lots of granaries and pictographs. The trail didn’t indicate where points of interest were, but it was quite obvious when a large side trail went off somewhere that there was probably something to see. The ruins were about half intact. They were sheltered from the weather by rock overhangs so water had probably never touched them. The ruins were a bunch of stacked flat rocks and it looked like they were mortared together with mud or a loose clay. One of the ruins had what looked like squash plants by it but there was no fruit on the plants. I hadn’t seen vines yet like this, and I imagined that they were left over from ancient farmers and had grown back season after season in homage to the ruins.

I went from ruin to ruin, taking each in. It’s cool to see history as part of a hike and not just the nature and scenery. This valley is very green compared to the terrain I have already passed through. So it’s unsurprising the Anasazi found and farmed it. They didn’t live here year-round though, they stayed in nearby and dry Beef Basin, though it is unknown why they didn’t live in one place year-round. I had an option to go to Beef Basin to see the ruins there as well, but I decided on an alternate route.

Near the end of the valley there was a really big spring gushing water. This was the first flowing good clear water I’ve seen on this trip (besides the Colorado River), so I obviously had to get some of it. I loaded up with 7 liters because I didn’t think I would see any for the rest of the day and early tomorrow. It was definitely noticeable when I put my pack back on with that much water weight. I also have the extra weight of the bear can. I collected the water at about 6,000 ft and ended up camping at 8,500 ft so I had to carry it up quite a ways.

In Salt Creek I did see both mountain lion and bear prints. I have seen a lot of medium-sized cat prints but I’m not sure what those are.

Leaving the Salt Creek area, the official trail goes up to Cathedral Butte where there is trailhead. I followed an alternate route I found on the internet to go the opposite direction and get me back towards where I was heading with less roadwalking. I had several different map sources available and one source showed this as actual trail, another source showed it as a 4×4 track and other sources didn’t show anything there at all. I wasn’t really sure what to expect for this route.

I started up a wash and briefly went away from the wash where I verified there was no supposed track or trail that some of the maps suggested. So, I followed the wash up as far as I could. I saw a couple cairns and a couple very old footprints along the way, but other than that, there wasn’t much sign of human passing this way. So, I was left to my own devices to get up the wash. I stuck to the wash, just judging which way looked easiest when it split a couple times. I ended up going up the final ascent through a steeper area with very big boulders. A couple of these were tough to get around and I had to take my pack off and squeeze under one and have big steps up for the other ones. Difficult with so much water. I made it up, though I’m sure it didn’t look pretty. I was caught up in the scrambling and wanted to get it over with, so I didn’t stop to get any pictures. There is no possible way there was ever a road here, so my maps were incorrect.

On top it was some cross-country, and then I rejoined another wash going down the opposite way. I followed this down and then picked up another wash going up. These weren’t as difficult as the first wash but they did have some challenges and I had to divert around obstacles a couple times. I eventually got to another marked 4×4 track. This was long disused, and at times I had to stare at the ground to trace out where it went. It’s always easier to follow a somewhat established route than just go off by myself through the desert. I followed this track until I joined a forest service road.

At the forest service road, I could go right or left. I’ve actually been debating this decision for about a month, and most of today aside from when I was exploring the ruins. I got input from several people before the trip and then a couple people I talked to at The Needles who had been in the area. I wanted to ultimately take the path which was the most scenic, which I couldn’t get good info on since they are both seldom travelled routes. It came down to either spending a lot more time in Dark Canyon or going the normal Hayduke route through terrain likely only travelled by Haydukers through some challenging but scenic terrain. Both routes had about the same amount of roadwalking to get to the start of them, and I decided on the spot to go to Dark Canyon since one of my friends spoke highly of it as a smaller Grand Canyon. This means that I will be skipping Beef Basin, Fable Valley and that area.

So, then it was down to the grind. I had about 13 miles of forest service roads to get to a trailhead where I could hit the trail down into Dark Valley. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but as I climbed in elevation, trees did start to appear. Also, as I started to climb, the leaves on the deciduous trees were changing color or falling as I gained elevation. The same trees weren’t changing yet at lower elevations.

I climbed and climbed and eventually got to about 8,500 feet. I had thought about going a few miles further today to sleep at a viewpoint over Dark Canyon, but it was going to get me to camp late, and I just didn’t want to push myself that hard so early in the trip. I ended up setting up in a field on top of a plateau. It’s chilly up here, and I’m keeping my sensitive items close to me tonight because I expect to see some frost in the morning.

I had more struggles with the Sterno today. I couldn’t even get it to stay lit, so I had slightly warmed water that I soaked my noodles in for a while, but they were still crunchy when I gave up letting them rehydrate. Far from the best camp dinner I’ve ever had, but it is what it is. All buttoned up in my tent and sleeping bag, ready for the cool of the night.

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Hayduke Trail Day 8

Yeti — Sun, 10 Oct 2021 01:18:04 +0000

Start: Needles Outpost Campground

Finish: Salt Creek Backcountry Campsite 4

Daily Mileage: 19.2

Trip Mileage: 124.9

Elevation gain/loss: 1375/833ft

Up early to maximize my hiking time in the fall daylight. I made my last use of the normal amenities like flowing water and Wi-Fi to check the weather before I quickly headed out. I had mapped out a brief cross-country route to get to where I was going to start the official National Park trail but conveniently found that my route almost directly overlayed an old road. Therefore, it was very easy going. I even found some sort of old electrical substation in the middle of nowhere, apparently destitute for years.

The first two days of this next section I will be hiking down the Salt Creek Trail which is famous for its Anasazi ruins. However, it turned out that on the first day there wasn’t too much since most of the ruins are further south.

The trail started down in wash where it was one with a 4×4 track for a while, though the track was gated. The trail shortly got into Salt Creek Canyon and 4x4s were not allowed to go further. The first thing I found in the canyon was an arch that you could walk through to get to the other side of the ridge. There was a string of Indian pictographs next to the arch which were the first pictographs I’d seen this trip. There’s supposed to be a lot of these out here in general, and I had waypoints for a few of them, but had not been able to find any yet on this hike. Salt Creek is one of the few water sources in the area (though not flowing now), and was used to farm the land in ancient times.

After taking in the arch in the pictographs, I continued down the wash and around a bend and saw another arch. I went up to that one as well and saw a couple more very faded pictographs. I went through that arch and then realized it was the same arch I had just visited! I didn’t realize I had just done a 180 degree turn in the wash, and could have just walked through the arch as a short cut. Oh well, no harm done, I just felt silly.

The rock was pretty varied through Salt Creek Canyon, but there is a lot of deep red with a band of bright white. I really like the combination of the two strikingly different colors side by side, separated by a discrete line. What happened to dramatically change the composition of the rock so quickly? I took lots of pictures of this throughout the day and just generally enjoyed this section of mostly actual trail.

I was doing pretty good on time, so I did a side trail out and back to Angel Arch, 1.7 miles each way. A pretty big detour for a long-distance backpacker! The National Park made me take a bear can to do this trail so I did leave the can at the trail junction trail so I didn’t have to drag the can plus five days of food all the way up and back. Might as well take advantage of having the bear can. It was a well worthwhile detour. Angel Arch was pretty impressive; it was high up and very large, and had a unique right pillar which resembled an angel with wings. There is also a formation there called The Molar which looks strikingly like a tooth.

II was going to stay up there and take a break for a bit longer, but some darker clouds started to roll in so I hiked back to rejoin my trail.

I got back to the main trail in short order and started to think about grabbing some water since it wasn’t too far to my camp. I passed a couple puddles which didn’t look that great, but I had been seeing a lot of water in this section so I figured I would pass those up and get some water closer to camp. I kept looking in the stream and it kept being bone dry and I made it all the way to camp without seeing any water! I pondered what to do now. There was a marked ruin slightly further down the trail and I thought that maybe there was a ruin because there was good water there. So, I went to the ruin and it was dry. I decided that I had no idea how far forward I would have to go to find water and that I should probably just turn around and go back to where I knew I saw water. I had to stay in the designated campsite to meet my permit. So, I headed back past my campsite again and back another two miles before I came to the water that I last saw.

I was filling up with water when dark clouds started to roll in once again. I got the minimum amount of water I needed plus an extra liter of unfiltered water in my reservoir and booked it back to camp. In this whole scramble to find water, I had just left my pack out at camp when I dashed off to find water. If it started raining it wouldn’t be good because it wasn’t waterproofed today. I really didn’t think through getting this water and made a few bad decisions today. I made it to camp without any rain and 2 hours after I first arrived. Perhaps my biggest set of mistakes on this trip so far, but I did manage to recover, thankfully with no real negative impacts.

My next adventure was using the Sterno for the first time to try to boil water. All I had was a can of Sterno and my pot, so I set the pot on top of a couple of rocks to prop it above the fire of the Sterno. The can of Sterno looked about 10 years old and went out several times without there even being any wind. I tried different size rocks in different setups and in about an hour I was left with some lukewarm water. Not ideal at all! I took what I had and just let my noodles soak for longer and they came out good enough in the end.

I was having a pretty good day enjoying the scenery until I got to camp and had my struggles with water and the Sterno. I have learned my lesson on being more conservative with water out here in the desert, and I resolved to think a lot harder when passing up sources in the future. I knew the Sterno wasn’t going to be ideal and it worked well enough. I will just have to hit the reset button with sleep tonight and then hopefully start tomorrow off better.

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Hayduke Trail Day 2

Yeti — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 01:18:04 +0000

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.

The "Best" option down... we passed

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.

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Hayduke Trail Day 1

Yeti — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 03:00:56 +0000

Start: Moab Airport

Finish: Just outside Arches National Park

Daily Mileage: 11.5

Trip Mileage: 11.5

Elevation gain/loss: 1436/1133ft

At 3-something in the morning the alarm went off and Kate and I somehow managed to deliver ourselves to the airport. We flew into the microscopic Moab airport with our packs and a checked cardboard box. The “terminal” was a room and the baggage was taken from a cart and deposited on a platform outside. We stuffed everything in our packs, contemplated how much water to take, and headed straight into the desert from the airport. We weren’t starting from the “official” starting point of the Hayduke trail since it is logistically challenging to get to, and you can easily join the route straight from the airport.

We followed 4×4 tracks and did some fun cross-country navigation on ribbed slickrock to head into Arches National Park. There were a fair number of 4x4s out, but they were enjoying the wilderness just like we were, so it didn’t bother me to share the public land.

When we got to Arches National Park, we quickly came to Tower Arch which we had seen coming for a long time in the wide-open desert landscape. The arch was really impressive; you could climb through it and it was enormous. We took a couple breaks around then because the temperatures were getting hot and we were in full sunlight. I’ve hiked in the desert before but I knew that I would have to do some adjusting for this trip to see how much water I needed to drink and carry. I don’t do the best in hot weather and Kate was about the same.

After Tower Arch we hiked a little bit of trail before we once again headed off on our own going down a wash until we had to abandon it to go a different direction. There is a lot of cryptobiotic soil around here which you’re not supposed to step on which makes cross country travel difficult. The cryptobiotic soil is a hard soil crust formed by bacteria colonies on the surface of the desert. It prevents erosion and desertification so it is important to the ecology of the area to leave it intact. Stepping on it harms the colonies and they can take years to recover. We did our best but can’t say we didn’t step on a little bit.

We navigated off-trail with a combination of GPS and compass, crossing the desert until we eventually rejoined a 4×4 track. We were walking down the track when a Jeep stopped and offered us water. We could have gotten by with what we had, but we gladly accepted a couple bottles of water. It was getting quite warm by this point, in the low 80s and we were fully exposed with the lack of cover out here.

We hiked down the 4×4 track for a while before turning off and going cross-country through rocky terrain.

About that time, we were getting tired because we had done around 12 miles since we started out the airport in the afternoon with a pretty aggressive pace. We also had a very early morning flying out of Seattle. Kate insisted that we start looking for a campsite and within a minute we stumbled across the first camp site we had seen the entire trip. Talk about timing! We settled in and hoped to watch the sunset but the sun disappeared behind some clouds before hitting the horizon. The Milky Way came out in full force quickly and I played around with my camera to get some good night time exposures before bed, cowboy camping beneath the stars and bats.

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