Thursday, March 11.
9 miles.
Welp, I definitely have a lot to catch up on. Officially on the Hayduke now. Will have to go back and fill in the rest of the ABQ/caching days, maybe when I’m in town again.
Too much to catch up on so let’s start from this morning. Woke up right outside Canyonlands in a little BLM spot. And by little I mean giant open area with amazing 360 views, including views of that one tower in Vertical Limit. Night wasn’t too bad though the wind was wild. Woke up around 3am thinking my tent was going to fly away. Thankfully the rocks I found to hold my stakes down held and I was able to fall asleep again.
After our usual cache morning coffee, we drove to the Canyonlands visitor center where I was able to pick up a backpacking permit. Took a while to get it with their fiddly system but the rangers were cool and helpful and now we don’t have to worry about permits for Canyonlands.
Afterwards we dropped off our last cache bucket at Needles Outpost. There was another Hayduke hiker there waiting for his resupply. Said he was going to start tomorrow so maybe we’ll see him down the road. The Needles Outpost owner was also very nice and friendly and told us the store should be open by the time we roll through.
We drove to Moab after to sort out all the town stuff. We stopped at a copy place to get a copy of Jordan’s insurance and registration for the storage rental. The copy lady was also nice and let me get the copy for free, saving me a whole 11 cents. Nice small gestures fill me with a small bit of hope for everything.
After we got some coffee and did a few laps around town trying to find a hotel. We managed to find one close to the center of town and they let us store one of our resupplies in their office and pick it up tomorrow when we get in. In hindsight, we could have definitely gotten groceries in town but it makes it easier to not have to grocery shop when we get in so we can veg out and get an early start the next day.
We finally met up with the storage owner. The owner was very nice too (everyone in southern Utah is nice apparently) but she had been hard to communicate with for the past week or so that we’ve been trying to rent the storage place. Until we actually parked the truck in the storage unit, I was pretty sure it was going to fall through for some reason. But we did manage to figure out the contract stuff and took the truck to the unit south of town. The owner gave us a ride back to the main part of town and we walked around trying to find some extra stakes for Jordan and wag bag for me (no catholes allowed in Arches).
We walked a bit on the main street towards Arches and started trying to hitch. It was a little rough with covid and being next to a construction area but eventually a climber picked us up. He wasn’t able to take us all the way to Arches but took us up the road past the construction near a parking lot. We were initially worried we weren’t in a good spot to get a ride and were going to walk down the road some more but just a few minutes later someone pulled into the parking lot and gave us a ride. Turns out he was hiker trash too and had done the PCT, AZT, and CT. He was doing the car life thing for a bit and being hiker trash himself knew the joys of hitchhiking. He agreed to take us all the way to Devil’s Garden. While I initially wanted to do the airport alternate, doing the Devil’s Garden wasn’t a bad way to start.
The trail from Devil’s Garden was pretty busy and we had to keep family hordes of day hikers. Did manage to see a few arches which are pretty cool. It’s dfficult to imagine the geological forces at play that create these weird natural structures. The ebb and flow of time and water and earth chipping and smoothing away.
We took a wrong turn at some point following some unfortunate social trails and ended up going the wrong way away from the actual trail. One mile into the hike and we already got lost. We managed to figure out we were going the wrong way quickly though and turned around and got back onto the trail. We followed it along some exposed ridges with great 360 views of the park. At the end of the trail there was a big sandstone tower from which we jumped onto some unofficial use trails. Those led us to the top of a rock band, a not too tall cliff that poured down into the Salt Valley below.
We followed the gps and map points down to where it was supposedly possible to scramble down. It didn’t look super appealing so we looked around for a bit for a better spot. After taking entirely too long, we said fuck and went down were we originally saw a way down. It wasn’t too bad for me with my long legs to scramble and hop down but Jordan got stuck for a second. We threw me down his pack and fucked up my shoulder a little. It feels okay now but I definitely need to baby it and not get heavy ass packs hurled on to it.
We made it down into the Salt Valley and onto a 4wd road. As we were crossing the valley, a storm blew towards us and it started lightly snowing. It also got dark so we had to hike for a while in the rain and snow. Good times. Thankfully we’re on a road and don’t have to do any off trail scrambling. Unfortunately though that road is sandy af and it makes it such a slog to get through.
We did eventually reach the point where it becomes BLM land and set up camp outside of Arches in a tight cozy little spot. It’s already getting cold again quickly and it might rain again so I’m glad we found this spot.
Plants Outside 