Drinking water for canyon wildlife

What a lovely morning for backpacking out of Grand Gulch. Straight ahead in this photo is the canyon wall, with the switchback trail, leading to the top of the canyon rim. From there it is and easy 2.5 mile or so, easy grade, Jeep trail type hike, to our pickup truck.

This was an easy backpacking trip. Only the very short pitch up and down the rim of Grand Gulch gave us a chance to really "test" the merits of our new lightweight internal frame packs.

We had a lot of fun together on this little excursion and there is nothing like sleeping beneath the desert stars in a mile high slickrock canyon, with somebody you love. Fun!

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4. Thursday 21st of April 2011
This was a test run for some new lightweight internal frame backpacks, my wife and I had purchased for this trip. After 40 years of using our comfortable, easy to access, Kelty Tioga external frame backpacks, we decided that for “off trail” canyon hiking, that some new light internal frame backpacks might be better suited (and besides I had a 20% off coupon and my 2010 REI refund dividend burning a hole in my jeans pocket at the time).

So I bought an REI Flash 65 and the Flash 50 for my wife. Not only would these work better for the overhangs encountered with off trail canyon hiking, but they stored in our pickup truck almost flat, when not in use.

To get to right to the point: We both LOVED these new packs. I still think we will use our external frames on most occasions when we are hiking a well established trail and balance and narrow low profile is not a consideration. But when we want to go light and have any plans for off trail backpacking, the new internals are here to stay.

You really need four wheel drive and high clearance to get all the way down to the stock pond trailhead for the Government Trail into Grand Gulch. Our old 1994 Toyota pickup truck with high clearance, low and high range “shift on the fly” four wheel drive, and adequate skid plates underneath, was just the ticket. We ended up parking next to a ranger’s pickup truck.

The Government Trail is easy hiking. It is an old Jeep trail so we could hike side by side for the 2.5 miles or so from the stock pond to the Grand Gulch canyon rim. The next half mile is steep in places and there are a couple of overhangs if you happen to have a high backpack. We had no trouble at all getting on down to the bottom of the Grand Gulch canyon. At a leisurely pace it took us an hour from trailhead to rim and half hour from rim to canyon bottom at Grand Gulch.

We hiked up Grand Gulch and took several “side hikes”, the most fun being to the “Big Man” pictograph panel. The stars of the panel are actually a Big Man (with modest male features) and a Big Woman. So why they don’t call it the Big COUPLE panel, I don’t know. Left over and hard to extinguish male chauvinism I guess.

We met a lot of nice people on this road trip and at the bottom of Grand Gulch we met a fit couple with two energetic young girls, camped near the mouth of Polly Canyon. The wife was preparing camp meals (toasted fajitas), that to us, seemed gourmet and outstanding camp cuisine. The next day the man would turn up as our hero of the road trip as the “Good Samaritan”.

Though the weather was good (nice temperatures and no rain), wind gusts hit pretty hard throughout the afternoon and into the evening. We were lucky that the “nice family” told us about an out of the wind camping location under a big bent cottonwood tree. The camping site was perfect for us.

We slept with the rain fly off of our REI Quarter Dome T-3 tent that night and enjoyed watching the big dipper, shooting stars, and a bright moon through the mesh canopy of the tent that night. We really slept well.

5. Friday 22nd of April 2011
We ate breakfast and watched the morning sun illuminate the sandstone canyon walls around us. The wind was gone and it was a perfect day. We took our time hiking down Grand Gulch and then back up to the rim of the canyon. Here we found a lady lying down under a juniper tree and her husband with a large backpack sitting on the slick rock. During our discussion we were told that she had badly sprained her ankle down in Grand Gulch (her husband didn’t tell us how long ago), but they had obviously made it to the rim together, leaving only the easy 2.5 mile “Jeep” road section to hike to the trailhead.

I asked the husband if they had a vehicle at the trailhead or had they had to park up the road above the four wheel drive section. He said they were at the trailhead. He showed no signs of needing our help so we continued on hiking toward our truck. Along the way we passed three backpackers, heading down government trail, and then along came the “Good Samaritan”, without any pack at all hiking down towards us. To be honest I didn’t recognize him as the father of the two little girls and husband of the good camp cook (the family who had told us about the good camp site). My wife, who is much more observant and attentive than me in social situations, picked right up on it.

Turns out that the lady hiker had hurt her ankle a couple of days ago and the Good Samaritan had decided to help them out a bit. He had hiked to the rim, took their vehicle keys, and carried her backpack all the way to the trailhead. There he had loaded her pack into their vehicle and was returning to them when we ran into him. How many people like that do you find these days?

It seemed obvious to me, that a four wheel drive vehicle could easily make the drive from stock pond to canyon rim, so when my wife and I drove out, we stopped at the Kane Ranger’s station to report the details of the woman hiker’s ankle situation. The lady ranger volunteer (well tanned from all the hiking she and her husband had been doing on their “off duty” hours), took notes and left me with the impression, that quality help would soon be available to the injured lady backpacker.

We then drove back to the same Blanding motel room we had stayed in Tuesday and Wednesday night and had reserved for Friday night. We took long hot showers, organized our gear, then headed across the street to the Homestead Steak House, where we toasted each other and gave thanks to our good fortune and all the fun we had had, over yet another “home cooked” meal of gigantic proportions. A wonderful close to pleasant little backpacking trip together.

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CEDAR MESA ROAD TRIP 17-26TH APRIL 2011 ~ Mr. & Mrs. Oldmantravels

In all we spent ten days and nine nights on the road, camping in the back of our pickup truck two nights, sleeping in our backpacking tent in Grand Gulch, and the other six nights luxuriating in the comforts of a motel room. Gas prices ranged from a low of $3.56 a gallon to $3.89, which was the highest we paid on this trip. We saw several $4.00 a gallon signs along the way.

Our figure 8 route took us through portions of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada. We drove a couple of roads we had never traveled; met some truly wonderful people; took many interesting day hikes to places we had never been, and tried out some new internal frame backpacks on a short backpacking trip into Grand Gulch.

Most of our activity, and time spent, was centered around the Cedar Mesa area of Southeastern Utah. Though the weather forecast did not look favorable for the first portion of our time in Utah, it turned out fine. It wasn’t until the return portion of our road trip, where we ran into several storms (thunder and lightening storms, a nasty hail storm, and a few snow storms thrown in).

If any of you are interested, in for whatever reason on following the travel portion of our road trip, you can connect these dots to form the figure 8 route we traveled, from start to finish: Home in Eastern Washington; Pendleton; Boise; Salt Lake City; Spanish Fork; Price; Green River; Hanksville; Natural Bridges National Monument; Blanding; [several days spent in the Cedar Mesa area]; Moab; Cisco; Mack; Rangely; Dinosaur; Vernal; Duchesne; Heber City; Salt Lake City; Wendover; Elko; Lamoille; Mountain City; Owyhee; Mountain Home; Boise; Pendleton; & home.