Sunday, April 25.
17.2 miles.
Jack’s new millionaire friend gave us a ride back to Colorado City early. We talked to him for a bit and he does seem like a nice guy, eccentric millionaire type who seemed to just want to help us out because he could. He offered us a place to stay when we finished but I think we’re just going to try to head to Moab.
We opted to start hiking from Colorado City and take an alt that goes through there. From Colorado City, the alt would be shorter than the main route but we’d be skipping a few road walk miles. Yeah, I’m fine with that. We got dropped off at a little park deep in the hills. The park is apparently used at a music venue on weekends and in fact there was a stage that was being set up. The park also had three natural spring spigots that had much tastier water than the sink water we’d packed out so we swapped it for that.
Jeremy told us a bit about Colorado City and gave us a quick little tour as we drove through the town. Turns out a lot of the fundamentalist stuff had actually disappeared in the past ten years or so since the last leader, Warren Jeffs, was arrested. Most of the town was no longer fundamentalist and it was actually rare to see any of them remaining. There was still a lot of evidence of their prior presence though. There were lots of giant houses with as many as ten rooms and giant yards. We went by Warren Jeffs former home and saw that it was basically a compound, complete with giant fortified walls. The building is a hotel now but still feels very imposing.
The town definitely wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Lots of little shops and even a few “glamping” campgrounds. Seems it’s really changed since the FLDSs were around.
We cameled up at the spring spigots since the alt is dry until after it reconnects with the main route. Thankfully we only had two days of food so even loaded up with water, our packs weren’t too heavy. Well, mine and Jordan’s weren’t anyway.
We hiked through some dirt back roads behind the town of Hildale, the sister city of Colorado City, and up a little creek canyon. The rock formations around here are mostly slickrock again, getting back to that good old southern Utah sandstone. We were in the Grand Canyon for so long I had forgotten what southern Utah is like.
We followed the creek trail through a few canyons until it connected with a “road”. I say road in quotations because it was more of a sand wash that occasionally went up slickrock. Zzzzzz
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I fell asleep writing this ha.
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Continued sometime in the future.
The sand was the absolutely finest sand we’ve hiked through. I know I said that about some other sections but this one without a doubt tops them all. We spent all day trying to find a way to make the hiking through the sand faster including hiking barefoot. This didn’t help much. We eventually made it to an off-trail section that was a little faster then onto a road that wasn’t as bad.
We found a spot to camp near the drop down into the river. Had some service so got to veg out for a bit. Tomorrow we should be officially in Zion. We still haven’t decided what we’re doing to finish our hike so we’ll see how it goes.
Plants Outside 