The Vicinity of Moab and Me: An Attempted Rapprochement

Southern Utah isn’t my place. It’s great for 12 hours or so, but then I want water and a color outside the orange-to-red part of the spectrum. Or, at least, THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.

Friday: Little Wild Horse and Bell Canyons

These slot-ish canyons are right near the BLM primitive camping sites just outside Goblin Valley State Park. It’s a fun hike. A little dry, I guess, but the occasional slick rock scrambles are entertaining, and, if you haven’t seen red rock in a couple years, it’s pretty.

That night, we stayed at Robber’s Roost (a hotel) in Green River. It was shady, but we didn’t get murdered. The most interesting thing about Green River is that the highest-rated restaurant is a taco truck at a closed-down gas station hanging out under a roof being held up with duct tape electrical tape (see below).

Fine, it’s the light being held up by the tape, not the roof.

Saturday: Druid Arch

Next day, we headed to Canyonlands, a park that I haven’t visited since the early oughts. There, we vultured our way into a parking space at the Elephant Rock trailhead and hiked on out to Druid Arch. It’s another hike with a lot of red rocks, not much water, and some fun slickrock obstacles of which I did not take photos for some reason. But here’s a panorama of the greater Druid Arch area, which would’ve been a decent panorama had I managed to not cut the top off of the arch.

And here’s somewhere else on that same hike, included for the sake of not implying that this is a short hike. Definitely a two-photo’er, at least.

And, at this point, we’d been in southern Utah for about 24 hours and everything seemed pretty good. All ready to pack up and go home and… well, but that wasn’t the plan, since it was still only Saturday. Ben’s cousin-in-law and her friend didn’t get to Moab till that evening, and there was still weekend remaining.

Sunday Morning: Floating the Colorado

Ergo, we went and rafted down the Colorado the next day. It was a pretty float, no real rapids, a lot of red rocks, and, confusingly, some water (!). Here’s the only photo that I appear to have taken of the event. Ben’s Pit Vipers were, as always, on point.

Sunday Afternoon: Corona Arch

I don’t remember. I wrote most of this post in June 2021, and it’s right now more than a year later. We hiked most of the way to the arch. Marissa’s dog sure wasn’t getting up that ladder, though, and seemed to be having a hard time throughout. But, Ben, Stephanie, and I went up the ladder, took in the long view of the arch, then called it good.

Sunday Evening: Delicate Arch

And, again, it’s been a while, and my recollection is that I was pretty tired to still be hiking at this point, and then the end of the hike tripped my acrophobia a little. But, I’d never been to Delicate Arch before, and now I have. So — that was cool.

It’s all fine. Just: dry, and everything is some shade between orange and red. And I still don’t *love* love southern Utah. Maybe I can boost the expected pleasantness period up to 24 hours now though.

Also, for a few months of my time with Ben, I had a sign on my fridge that said, in part, “remember, southern Utah is *nice*”. I dunno. It’s nice. I should like it. It’s been a weird last few years.

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Spooky and Peek-a-Boo Gulch II: Revenge of the Slot Canyon

Right, so headed out to southern Utah a couple weeks ago to meet up with two of my brothers and go backpacking in the world’s longest hikable slot canyon, Buckskin Gulch. Then it was too cold (per the ranger, the puddles were waist deep and, per the weather report, it was below freezing overnight therefore, per common sense, we considered the likelihood of frostbite), so we bailed on that one and drove up to Escalante* instead.

I hiked Spooky and Peek-a-Boo Gulches about the same time last year. It didn’t change much during the intervening 13 months. Here are pictures (obviously).

As was noted last year, it’s a very skinny slot canyon:

Getting through the gulches requires some amount of athleticism (or your older brother to offer you a hand):

It was sort of a rock-fall chimney that you had to climb through. I took the photo from the top part (I went first since I was athletic enough), Garry’s at the middle part, and Craig’s coming up from the bottom.

And then Peek-a-Boo has cool little features like this:

And this:

And then there’s the 20-foot drop to exit Peek-a-Boo, which isn’t as bad as it sounds. This is an awesome hike, btw. It doesn’t hold a lot of surprise for me at this point, but I’d do it again tomorrow just because it’s a fun set of situations to have to navigate.

Then we went to Lower Calf Creek Falls, which I’d also visited before (on the road trip). Not much wonder there, either, but a nice, easy hike and still pretty.

And then we went to Coyote Gulch on an overnighter, but that warrants its own post. Not that I’ll necessarily get around to it, just that it’s warranted.

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* That is to say, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument**, which is accessed via the town of Escalante.

** AKA, the Bill Clinton Came in Third in Utah, So He Didn’t Care about Pissing People Off There by Surprise-Executive-Decreeing a National Monument That Locals Didn’t Want Monument.

Spooky Gulch, Peek-a-Boo Gulch, and Dry Fork Hike

I was told that I had to do the “beginner” slot canyons along the Hole-in-the-Rock Road once in my life. They’re tourist hikes, thus the reluctance. If not for that, they’re pretty fantastic (was the gist).

They were pretty fantastic and there were a lot of tourists. Frex, here’s half of the parking lot:

It’s showing fewer than half the cars that were there. Kind of amazing given that you’re driving 28 miles down a washboardy dirt road. OTOH, the Prius made it, so it’s obviously not a big hurdle.

When I got there, there was a huge family group just heading down the trail. It was grandma’s birthday. Probably 40 people ranging from age 0 to maybe 80. The posted maximum group size is 12. They wore a lot of University of Utah gear. Draw your own conclusions. Mine involves West Valley City, one of those 2 1/2-year missions to Russia, and a ward where there is no Sunday school.

Headed down the trail:

You can actually see the entrance to Peek-a-Boo Gulch in that photo, but you’d have to know what you’re looking for. It’s just a fold in the rock, about halfway up and 25% over from the left. Waldo and so forth. Here’s what it (the opening) looks like zoomed in:

It goes toward the left. Anyway.

Catherine at the B&B had given me instructions that involved starting the loop by going up Peek-a-Boo. By the time I got down there, though, I’d caught up to The Family Group and, thinking that a narrow slot canyon might decrease the usual joy I receive at listening to the cries of a hundred ten-year-olds, I kept going toward Spooky Gulch.

Which, after the fact, I think was better anyway. It’s narrower, but a whole lot easier to get into.

Here’s the one place I had to get down on hands and knees and crawl along the dirt like a common lizard:

And then things got narrower.

So I think that was the narrowest spot in the canyon. I had to walk through their sideways and, even doing so, the rock walls were compressing my chest as I slid through. It’d probably be less dramatic if you squatted down a little bit, but I didn’t do that. (I had to take the backpack off in order to fit through sideways.)

This would kind of be a bad hike if you were claustrophobic. Or, like, stout.

After a while, you come to parts of the slot where you have to scramble a little. Here’s one:

Not sure if the photo captures it, but you’re trying to squeeze through some tight spaces while climbing up “steps” that are chest-high and not crack your head open in the process. It’s kind of fun. Here’s another little hole I had to climb through (photo taken after climbing):

While you’re walking through the gulch, there are some spots where the sun gets down to the bottom of the slot, others where you can’t see the sky. It’s interesting. The rock formations are cool and weird, Seussian even.

Oh, and it’s sort of awkward (especially in Spooky Gulch) when you hear someone coming down the canyon when you’re going up. There aren’t a lot of convenient passing locations.

Not too long after the arch, you exit Spooky and you’re up on a flat, red-sand plain. According to the directions I got from the B&B hostess, I needed to turn left at a right angle and keep walking until I found Peek-a-Boo Gulch. Catherine, the hostess, suggested that I err on cutting the angle too acutely rather than too obliquely, since if I missed the end of the slot I’d end up wandering through the desert for a couple weeks before probably dying.

Here’s what the route between the gulches looks like:

I figured that so long as I followed the footsteps, at least I’d see where other people had died of dehydration before doing so myself. Didn’t work out that way, of course. Here’s the top of Peek-a-Boo Gulch (close to the top anyway):

So, yeah, then you basically just go down there. Peek-a-Boo Gulch isn’t quite as narrow as Spooky, but it’s got a few more unusual features. Here’s a hairpin turn I thought was cool:

Yep. Then here’s a cool arch+light situation:

It’s kind of hard to get into good positions to take photos in there sometimes. Here’s a bridge overhead:

And then you’re just about at the bottom of Peek-a-Boo, where it gets kind of interesting. There are a couple of big pot holes that you have to either long-jump or climb down and back up. Fortunately there were some people around there so that when my long jump fell a little short I got a hand-up so I didn’t have to retreat down into the mud. These potholes are positioned between some pretty cool arches:

And then this is how Peek-a-Boo ends. Or how it begins if you start here:

So it’s pretty close to straight up from where I’m standing to where the green jacket guy is, and then it’s pretty much straight down from where I’m standing to the bottom of that wall. And at this point, I was wondering how it is that this is such a *tourist* hike. Seems like a lot of narrow squeezes, pull-ups, having to trust your entire weight to the friction between the soles of your boots and a near-vertical wall, and stuff like that to be such a tourist hike. Oh well. Maybe it’d be way more crowded without those features. Or maybe way less.

Catherine also suggested heading up Dry Fork as sort of a cool-down after Spooky and Peek-a-Boo. It was nice, not nearly as dramatic, but: nice.

It does open up a little better and let a little more light in, though.

Then once you get to the top of Dry Fork, you head cross-country looking for the parking lot.

Really cool experience, something I hadn’t done before, worth doing, etc.

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