Monday, March 15
20 miles?
Woke up cold and drenched in condensation. The spot we found last night in the dark seemed decent, flat and not in a drainage, which is what constitutes a good site on the Hayduke so far but apparently it was still prone to condensation.
Thankfully the day was sunny. After days of rain and clouds we got to see some blue sky and sun.
We hiked on the road we were on all afternoon yesterday for a mile or so then entered into our first real off-trail canyon. The descent was mostly easy, not to complicated working our way down. From there we hiked in and out of a few other small canyons until we hit a huge pour off we couldn’t descend into. Instead, we followed a big shelf around it, following a pretty well marked cattle trail and the footprints of what seems to be two hikers in front of us.
We followed that onto another little canyon which led us to another dirt road. There wasn’t much water along the way, despite the recent rain and snow. There were plenty of mud holes on the road but they weren’t too appealing (or easy to get water from, I tried). Instead we grabbed some water from a little pothole that had collected some slightly alkaline water, the first of our trip. Jordan and I both read a lot of journals before this hike and pretty much all of them mention the alkaline water. Some people have had series problems from drinking too much of it and we were pretty leery of it. We filled up though and kept hiking until we came to a little flowing spring. Downstream of the spring was covered in cow shit and very alkaline tasting, even more so that the pothole before. I stupidly thought that the spring would be better (it was labeled as a “good spring” on one of our maps) and dumped my pothole water out. We found the spring from the rock wall, away from all the cow shit, but it was still really alkaline. We didn’t have much of choice though since we had almost 10 miles to our next water source, a possibly contaminated creek.
I tried not to drink too much of it to avoid feeling bad but that just lead to me getting pretty dehydrated fast. It was much warmer than the previous days and the dry road we were on didn’t help.
We eventually got off trail again, back down into some canyons. During one of the little scrambles down one of them, we found a fairly deep pothole filled with rain water. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t alkaline so we dumped our other water and filled up.
From there we hiked from canyon to canyon, first Rustler then into Indian Creek, following that a ways until we had to climb up. The scramble up out of Indian Creek was very steep, one of the steepest climbs we’ve had so far. It wasn’t actually that steep but bogged down with 4 liters of water and my much weaker post covid lungs, I definitely felt it.
On the climb up we smelled from campfire smoke and when we got halfway up we ran into another Hayduke hiker, our fourth so far. We talked very briefly and kept scrambling our way up the ledges out of Indian Creek. As we went up, we got some incredible views of the canyons we had been in all day and the La Sal mountains in the distance.
We had dinner on a ledge overlooking it all and then kept scrambling. The way up started getting more technical with some class 3 moves thrown in here and there. I am very grateful for Skurka’s guidebook since his beta for the way up was a lot more helpful than the actual guidebook.
The sun set as we worked our way up the ledges. We found a nice spot to set up our tents that even had service but unfortunately the ground was too hard for us to dig our stakes into. Normally we would have just cowboy camped but there were some dark clouds rolling in and a weather check indicated it was going to snow again tonight.
So we packed up and stumbled around in the dark trying to find some soft ground away from the wind for a while until we finally found a not great spot. Scrambling in the dark is not that fun and I’m glad we found a spot.
We also realized today that even though we are 5 days into our hike, this is actually our first tent to tent day. All the other days we’ve either started or ended in a hotel room. Guess we’re real thru hikers now.
Canyonlands and our first official resupply tomorrow. Just gotta figure out a way through these canyons first.
Plants Outside 