I woke early, just as the sky started to lighten. I dozed on and off since the real sunrise show won’t happen for another hour. Both of us woke up in time to watch the sunrise from our sleeping bags. In the stillness of the morning air, we heard dogs barking and cars starting and driving, sounds of civilization wafting up from the Escalante valley just beyond the low pass we are camped at. Being out on the open plateau, the sun warmed us by 7:30am so we packed up much earlier than we had down been packing up down in the deep canyons. We started walking and noted many exciting tracks crossing the sand on the trail: bobcat, lizards, bighorn sheep, squirrels. Once again we hit slickrock and descended the plateau walls to the green and civilized Escalante Valley below. Now we can see the driving vehicles that we heard from camp.
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| Sunrise from our sleepingbags |
At the valley floor, we realized we were actually very close to finding the trail when looking for the BMT a few days ago. The trail becomes very obscure near a rancher’s property. The best way to find the western end of the Boulder Mail Trail route is to enter into the Escalante river, hike a few hundred yards, and, when that trail makes it’s first dramatic turn North, you’ll notice a rather nondescript junction in the trail, the right continuing on with the Escalante River and the left entering a large side canyon with a creek flowing into the Escalante. Stay on the north side of that creek and follow it until it reaches a fence. There should be a pedestrian entrance in the fence. Once onto the rancher's property, continue following the creek upstream, staying on the northern edge. Eventually, the cliff face that has been on your right turns dramatically to the north while the creek continues northwest. Now you must follow the edge of the rock face, going up a large sandy wash. Eventually, you’ll start to see cairns where a shallow, steep drainage starts going straight up and traversing across the rock face. This is the only confusing part of the entire trail. Once you are up on that rock, the cairns lead the way.
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| Green civilization of Escalante town |
We saw our first person of the entire backpacking trip just before reaching the parking lot and chatted for a bit. We reach the parking lot by 10:30am and laugh at the three Oregon license plates out of the 4 cars parked. I guess residents of a certain state are sun-deprived!! In town, we stopped at the Escalante Outfitters to get some food and recharge our camera batteries. We picked up a few items at the grocery store, hit up another restaurant - Circle D - for a lunch of salad, back to the outfitters to grab our recharged camera batteries, then headed out down Hole-in-the-rock Road.
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| Hole-in-the-rock Road |
We were a little nervous taking on this road in our low-clearance Volkswagon GTI and, at first, we were moving slow on the gravel road. But after about 15 miles, the road turned to compact sand and sandstone so we’re able to pick up the speed, being careful not to hit any potholes or get stuck in deep sand. After about an hour and a half, we arrive at Hurricane Wash Trailhead. However, we realized we had forgotten to refill our water to capacity. It’s 2:40pm on a hot, cloudless day, we have about five miles of sandy desert hiking until the first water source, and we have a quart of water per person!! Not smart at all! We headed out anyway. We managed to make our water last for the first 3 miles.
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| Cool looking lizard |
Hurricane wash became prettier as we got deeper into its canyon. One section narrowed into a wash five feet across and 30 feet high of slick red sandstone. We both thought how screwed one would be here during a large flash flood! The wash widened again and we finally reached the confluence with Coyote Gulch around 5:30pm. We filled our water bottles and treated the water, soaked our hot feet in the river, and drank up before moving on to find a campsite for the night.
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| Walking down Hurricane Wash |
Coyote Gulch was amazing! The river winds back and forth, surrounded on both sides by steep red sandstone cliffs of up to 100 ft tall. Some of the river bends were carved deep into the rock, making large overhangs protruding out over the river. Many more people were in this area than our last hike and nearly every bend was taken up by a group of campers. A bend with one of the deeper overhangs was occupied by a loud group of young people, the overhang causing their ruckus to echo for nearly half a mile each way. Safely beyond their noise, we found a nondescript bend with nobody around to disturb our quiet, private camp. We set out our sleeping bags, made dinner, and watched 'change of shift' from the day-shift swallows to the night-shift bats. Lots of bats appeared and we watched them dance around as the stars came out.
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| We made it! Coyote Gulch |
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