Seldom Through Escalante

The original aim for Sarah’s fall break was frontcountry camping with day hikes, sport climbing, swimming, and sunshine—the opposite of bushwhacking in Alaska. After much deliberation and planning, however, we chose a 150-mile off-trail route through canyon country. The aim was to go down the Escalante River and up through Capitol Reef National Park in six days.

Unfortunately, the Escalante was filled with brush and the riverbanks were steeper than expected—up to 10 feet tall and, more often than not, close to vertical. We crossed the river approximately 180 times. It took five hard days to get through the canyon before we bailed out to the Coyote Gulch trailhead. We canceled on Capitol Reef—the part we were most excited about and had spent over forty hours developing the route—and hurried back to Salt Lake for a house!!

Our 80 mile Escalante hike (red) and the intended 75 mile link-up through Capitol Reef (orange)

Though the trip involved more hardship than desired, we were fortunate to see a very fine canyon landscape. Most impressive to me were:

(1) The effort to remove Russian olive from the watershed. We passed three crews of six ish people working in the upper canyon. They were cutting smaller trees into sections and girdling the larger trees, spraying the cut with poison, and letting the tree die standing. The problem with Russian olive, one young lad told us, is it holds the riverbank in place, which creates tall, steep banks that increase the speed of the river and destroy fish habitat. We saw stumps from previous crews throughout the upper two thirds of the canyon and sections of cut trees throughout the 76 miles we walked in the canyon. In some areas, floods piled the cut olive logs in four-foot high walls that we climbed over, and over, and over.

(2) The rock climbing potential was astonishing. Huge 1500-foot walls, splitter cracks, and perfect boulders graced the lower third of the canyon. We walked by one five-star highball problem that appeared V4. The start was a hand-heel match about five feet off the ground, then it moved through pockets and jugs to a three-foot throw from a rail to the top, close to twenty feet off a flat sandy landing. I tried to pull onto the start with my trail runners on, but felt far too weak from hiking.

(3) The difficulty of the terrain and vegetation for a dog. This trip was the first that Seldom, Sarah’s dog, carried his food in a pack. He’s an very capable outdoor dog—he makes 4^th class scrambling look like a ride on an escalator, does 30-mile mountain bike rides, and finds his way home when we leave him up to 10-miles away. Swimming across the Escalante with a pack on (it weighed 15% of his body weight), charging through dense brush, walking through fields of sharp tumbleweed and cacti, and climbing up and sliding down the steep banks brutalized him. He developed large lesions under his arms from the wet, sandy pack rubbing on the inside of his front armpits (we carried his pack for the fifth day), and worse, he was so exhausted from the trip that it took four days of sleeping and eating in Salt Lake before he regained his usual spunk and personality. Next time, we’ll spend more time considering how vegetation will impact him, and try out the pack again to see if the problem was a poor fit, or sandy wetness.

Getting water from a tank at the Coyote Gulch trailhead before walking/hitching back to the car