It was a cold night; definitely my coldest night on this trail.  I awoke to a good coating of frost inside my tent, probably because I was camped next to the river.  Due to the cold, I was a little more hesitant to get going this morning since I would have to immediately plunge into the river.  I fueled myself with leftover steak and potatoes from last night and an egg from Kristi.  So much better than my oatmeal, even my homemade oatmeal.

I packed up and even considered wearing my down puffy, which I never do as a rule while hiking.  However, since this is the last day of my trip, I can throw some caution to the wind since I do not need to manage my gear for future days.  I ultimately decided to just use an upper thermal layer, my shirt, and my hard shell.  I could put on the puffy if I needed it.

I hiked over to the river and stood next to it for about a minute, steeling my resolve before and wondering what I was doing out here ready to walk miles down a river in 20 degrees.  I worked up the courage to step out into the river.  The water was obviously cold but warmer than the air, and I quickly crossed to the other side.

It was a bed and breakfast that I stayed at, so obviously, there was breakfast: biscuits with sausage gravy, scrambled eggs, fruit, and orange juice.  Way better than my normal backpacking breakfast.  The eggs came from the chickens in their backyard too.  They also gave me four boiled eggs for the road.  That’ll do it.

Kristi offered to drop me off at the trailhead instead of walking through town, and I took her up on that.  I decided to take one last alternate from the Hayduke.  The usual route stays on roads all day through BLM land, and they looked pretty flat and straight.  That didn’t look too exciting to me considering my past couple of days across the Arizona Strip.  However, I noticed that there was a wilderness area directly north of Colorado City with some trails and tracks that would take me back to the Hayduke.  That looked much more appealing than road walking, so I opted to do that instead.

Definitely not my best night out here, and my worst campsite by far.  I did hear some coyotes howling and yipping early in the night, but after that, it didn’t bother me.  I also saw two big dogs or wolves pass by my camp in the night.  I saw their footprints in the morning, and they were enormous.  Not sure what they were; I just saw a glimpse of white.

The wind did calm down overnight, but it came up again in the morning when I was packing up.  It was pretty cold in the morning, below freezing for sure.  Since I was heading into town, I just put on all my insulation layers except my puffy and set off down the flat, straight road.  I did find some broken glass under my tent when I packed it up in the morning.  That’s pretty awesome.  I didn’t see any obvious damage to the tent though.

I woke up and packed up quickly this morning; so quickly that it was still dark when I was ready to go.  I had to wait a few minutes for it to get light enough since I was going to be once again wading the Paria, and this is not really something I wanted to do in the dark.

When I started, I played the same game of trying to keep my shoes out of the water.  My shoes and socks were still wet this morning, and surprisingly, it just didn’t really appeal to me to plunge my feet into a river at 7:30 in the morning with a wind coming down the canyon and the temperatures probably in the 30s.  It didn’t take very long until I just had to take the plunge.  Then I had to cross a bunch more times in the 2 miles before I hit Sheep Canyon.

Last night, I camped right at the edge of the Paria stripe where there’s a very distinct line with red stone on the bottom and white stone above it.  This continued as I went upstream, and it’s just one more unique feature of the constantly changing scenery here.  I hit my turnoff to Sheep Canyon sooner than I was expecting.  I guess I made pretty good progress charging up the Paria after I decided to get my feet wet.

I took a zero day today (zero trail miles day, a day off), my first of the trip on Day 22.  My body felt good, but I’m currently two days ahead of my schedule, and it’s probably not a bad thing to give myself a break.  I try not to work off of a schedule too much, but it’s sort of necessary for this trip since I have two permits later in the trip that I have to start on specific days.  Otherwise, I might have just ended up finishing up the trip a little bit early.

 I did all my town chores today and even heard there were two other hikers in town.  I went to all the normal hiker-type haunts (restaurants and bars) and couldn’t find them, so I concluded they were just a myth.  When I reconnected my phone to the internet, Google decided to delete all my offline journal entries for the last week of the trail, syncing to the cloud and deleting my offline files.  I ended up having to rewrite all of them, a few thousand words.  Pretty frustrating.  Everything else pretty much worked out, though.  I got a lot of good real food and got everything else I needed in town.  I also met some awesome people on the way.  It’s nice to just talk to people, tell your story, and have open conversations like that.

I was up and ready to hike as soon as it was just light enough since I was headed into town today.  I had about 10 miles to go and was ready for a break.  I continued briefly down the 4×4 track I was on and almost immediately came upon a water tank that I didn’t know about where I could have gotten water.  Oh well, as I’ve learned, you have to be safe vs sorry out here with water.  I did have a good sunrise behind me with a wide-open view since I was in a high area.

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 got up as normal and started hiking down the track, enjoying views of the Dirty Devil Canyon below.  It was nice, but I definitely think that Hatch Canyon was way more scenic and a very good alternate to take, apart from the sketchy exit climb.  I wandered down the track for a while before I came to the Dirty Devil River, which I had to cross.  Sloppy Joe was sitting there, apparently waiting for me, and announced that the river was deep, flowing fast, and didn’t look crossable, at least here.  He said he could maybe scramble to another area of the river to cross, but he wasn’t sure what to do.

Last night was a bit rough.  As predicted, it did rain, and water came in from both up and down the canyon.  A particularly strong gust caused some of my rock tent anchors to slide, releasing the tension on my tent, and causing it to sink inwards.  I curled up a little tighter in my sleeping bag to avoid it touching the wet tent.  It was good enough; I didn’t want to get out of the tent in the rain to fix it.

 As soon as it was light enough, I got out of my tent to check the river.  It still sounded about the same, but I was concerned about the water level.  It had gone up a little, but not significantly.  That was a good sign, but the risk of flash floods remained as it continued to rain slightly.  I quickly packed up and hit the trail.  Although this lower part of Dark Canyon was beautiful and enjoyable, I wanted to exit the canyon swiftly to avoid any flood dangers.

I had to set myself up to nero (nearly a zero-mile hiking day) today, and thought I only had eight or nine miles left to go before I hit the Needles Visitor Center for Canyonlands National Park.  I was up with my pack on as soon as it was light enough to see.  I immediately hit a 4×4 track which would take me to the visitor center with a couple turns.  I cruised down the 4×4 track with the notion of “town” in my head, not really looking around too much.  It turns out that I was only about 4 miles from the visitor center and it was a very quick morning hike.  Right as I got to the visitor center it started sprinkle, perfect timing!

 I got my backcountry permit for the next day and pumped the ranger for some general trail info around the area since she did a lot of backcountry backpacking.  I also got some of my lingering questions answered about a couple things I’d seen in the desert so far like the alkaline water and how to minimize damage the cryptobiotic soil which I have to occasionally cross.  Then I hung out at the visitor center for a little bit to use their Wi-Fi for the first time in 5 days until it died.  Then I headed over to The Needles Outpost which had my resupply package and where I would spend the day and night.