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Utah Trip #2: Escalante

Our fall trip to Utah canyon country was off to a good start. We spent the weekend in Torrey and did two good hikes in Capitol Reef National Park. Next stop was Escalante and we arrived there late afternoon on Sunday. We had reservations at the Canyon Country Lodge for the next three nights. Or at least, that's what we thought. There was a young guy at the desk who told us that our reservation wasn't until the next day. I checked my email and saw that I had received a welcome email from them from the day before. It had our confirmation number but listed our start date as tomorrow. Weird. I could have sworn that I had booked the correct dates. We asked if we could check in anyway. Nope. Sorry. They were full up tonight. Ruh Roh. We had a problem. Sandy hates camping out, not to mention that we didn't have any camping equipment anyway. We left to see if we could find someplace to stay for the night. Sandy didn't say anything but I was kind of getting dirty looks since I was the one who made the reservation.

Escalante is a small town and there aren't many hotels there. My standby when I have stayed there while traveling on my own is the Prospector Inn. It's a bit downmarket from the Canyon Country Lodge but it's clean (and cheaper). It certainly would be better than nothing. They did have a room available so we grabbed it. Whew! At least we wouldn't be sleeping in the street.

I was puzzled about how I could have gotten the reservation wrong. When we got to our room and brought our stuff inside, I checked my briefcase for the folder with all our travel papers. The reservation for the hotel showed the correct dates. Checking the email trail, I had made the reservation correctly and they had confirmed the correct dates. Somehow when they sent us the welcome email the day before checkin, they changed the date.

Needless to say, I was upset about this so we charged back to the Canyon Country Inn. When we showed it to the kid at the desk he was very apologetic but didn't know what to do. I asked to speak to the manager. I hated sounding like a Karen, but in this case I thought it was justified. When he called her, the manager turned out to be his mom. I guess he was home from school for a while and helping out at the front desk during slow times. When Mom got there, she was also apolgetic and after a minute or two of typing said that she had fixed it and our room was ready. Apparently junior couldn't see what rooms were available. He also had messed things up somehow when the welcome email was sent out. You just can't get good help anymore.

Great. An hour ago we didn't have any rooms. Now we had two. We trudged back to the Ponderosa Inn and I talked to the guy at the dest there. I explained our situation and asked if we could unrent our room. He was sympathetic but said that since the charge had gone through, he couldn't reverse it. I suspect that isn't exactly true, but I could understand that after we had gotten the room a a half hour ago he didn't want to just give us a refune. I left him the key and went back to our "real" hotel.

Mom was still at the desk so I explained how we had ended up having to pay for two rooms for the night because of their error. Since we had paid $138 for the extra room at the Prospect Inn, she took $100 off the price of our room at the Canyon Country Inn. Not perfect, but a good effort to make things right. I was ok with that. With that settled, we went to Escalante Outfitters for dinner. It was a beautiful day so we sat on the patio. Sandy had a salad and then we shared a pizza. That night we watched the Brewers lose to the Cardinals 3-2. I always hate to see them lose to St. Louis, but at least they took two out of three to win the series.

The next morning we started with a drive down the Hole-in-the-Rock Road to the Upper Dry Fork Trailhead. I had been here in March to attempt Peekaboo and Spooky slot canyons. I was unsuccessful, but the approach to them went through Dry Fork, which also has a nice slot canyon. The plan today was to do the Dry Fork Loop, which is about a three and a half mile hike, mostly flat. We'd hike through the Dry Fork Canyon Narrows and go past the entrance to Peekaboo, which is the place I got stopped on my last trip. I wanted to get another look at it because I'd like to go back and try it again some time.

When we got to the trailhead, there were about thirty young people standing around. Apparently it was a youth group that had been camping nearby and now were getting ready to do a hike. Sandy wanted to use the rest room before we started because in the desert there are no bushes to provide privacy once you are on the trail. Unfortunately, so did all the young women in the group so she was about fifteenth in line. Fortunately they were very polite and since they were all leaving together, they let her jump the queue. We set off right away to try to get as far ahead of them as we could.

It was a bright sunny day and the hike across the open desert went quickly. We reached Dry Fork and dropped down into the wash and started to follow it. The walls began to rise up and close in. We were getting into the Narrows. We reached a spot where there was a rock step, a drop of a foot and a half, maybe two feet, across the floor of the canyon. Below it the ground looked muddy, especially right below the step.

I stopped for a minute to see what our options were. I had a bad experience with a mud puddle in the San Rafael Swell a few years ago, in Crack Canyon. I noticed some ledges on the side. It looked like I could climb over those and around most of the muddy section. There wasn't that much mud. It probably extended less than ten feet from the rock step.

While I was working my way around, very slowly, Sandy thought I was overthinking things. She just half-stepped, half-jumped off the rock step. It turned out the mud wasn't sandy soil like a lot of the wash, but soil with a lot of clay in it. The mud was an inch or two deep and was very slippery. When she landed, she slipped and pitched forward onto her hands and knees. Yuck! I told her to keep still. I was able to get to her and help her to stand up. We went back the way I had gone and got back on the rock above the mud.

She was a mess. From the knees down she was covered in mud, and from her elbows down too. Some mud had splashed on other parts of her. Needless to say, she wasn't happy.

I took out my water bottle and poured water over her hands to wash some of the mud off. Then I let her wipe her hands and arms off on the back of my tshirt. It was an old one that I was planning to toss on the trip anyway so that wasn't a big sacrifice. There wasn't anything we could do about her pants and hiking boots. They were a slimy mess. The good news was that she wasn't hurt at all.

We obviously weren't going to hike any farther. Time to turn back. As it was, she would have to hike about a mile to get back to the car with the lower half of her covered with mud. There wasn't anything else we could do. Sandy is a tough hiker, so after a burst of expletives for the first minute or two, she hiked back with only an occasional mumble or grumble.

Even when we got back to the trailhead, she didn't have a change of clothes in the car. There wasn't anything that she could use to clean up. All of our stuff was back at the hotel. We didn't want her to get her side of the car all muddy either. She had a long ride back to Boise before we could get it cleaned. The one thing I did have was a large doggie cover for the back seat. It was big enough that I used it to cover her seat and even the floor on her side of the car. She was still muddy on the ride back but at least her seat and the car didn't get all muddy too.

Sandy was taking it pretty well. On the way back we even stopped at the Devil's Garden Outstanding Natural Area. It's a concentration of hoodoos, spires and other unusual rock formations in a fairly small area. Sandy figured that she was muddy and there wasn't anything she could do about it till we got back to Escalante, so she might as well see it while we were right here. We spent about twenty minuts wandering around the area and taking pictures. Then we finally went to the hotel.

We parked way at the end of the building where no one could see us. The first thing I did was go to our room and get her some clean clothes so she could change. There was a water spigot right next to the door that she used to wash most of the mud off of her boots and her hiking pants. After taking hot showers, we both felt as good as new. We were ready to get something to eat.

We decided to try Nemo's, a place we hadn't been to before. It's a drive in with no inside seating, but it was a beautirful day and we sat on a picnic bench in the shade under a tree. We had hamburgers and french fries and they sure tasted good. I guess getting dirty is hard work and makes you hungry. Sandy was in a good mood considering all that she had been through. When I suggested that in a week she would be telling this story to her friends and laughing about it, I did get a bit of a side-eye look. Too soon, I guess.

Our hotel had a laundry room so after dinner I was able to wash all of our clothes, especially Sandy's. Besides being messy, the mud found in slot canyons usually has a horrible smell. I have to admit that I was glad I was using the hotel's washer instead of mine at home. But we were clean. Our clothes were clean. There was no harm done from Sandy's misfortune today. We could put the episode behind us.

There was no ball game so Sandy and I decided to go stargazing. Escalante is a small town and is very remote, surrounded by the huge Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It has exceptionaly dark skies. We drove about ten miles out of town to the turn off for Hole-in-the-Rock road. And yes, the sky was dark and the stars were amazing. We took some pictures with our phones. My Galaxy S21 didn't do very well but Sandy's iPhone 16 took some surprisingly good photos of the Milky Way.

Even though very few things had gone smoothly since we had arrived in Escalante, it was still an enjoyable time. Maybe more for me than Sandy. After all, I'm not the one who fell in the mud. But none of our problems had been serious. Still, we were ready for things to get back on track. We were hoping that bad things don't always come in threes.

The next day was clear and sunny. We were optimistic that things were going to go well. We would shift from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to Kodachrome Basin State Park. About half way between Escalante and Bryce Canyon, we had never been there before. It had been on my list of places to visit for a long time though, and today was finaly going to be the day. It took us an hour to drive to the park, but that was ok. It's pretty remote. There aren't many places to stay that are closer other than the campground in the park. That's not an option for us because Sandy is not a camper.

When we reached the park we stopped at the entrance station. The visitor center was right there and we saw a lot of cool stuff in the gift shop. Since I am not an impulsive buyer, I wanted to think about what we would get, but for sure we were going to come back and stop on the way out. And for sure we were going to get some stuff.

We decided to do the Panorama Loop Trail. It's actually two loop trails, a short (about three miles) and a long (about six miles) loop, both pretty flat. Being the intrepid hikers that we are, of course we wanted to do the long loop. There are also some short spur trails off the main loop that lead to various points of interest and make for a little bit longer hike. The starting point was at the Panorama Trailhead (I know, who would have guessed?). Although there was a large parking lot, we were the only car there. Considering how everyplace else we had been so far on this trip there had been crowds of hikers, we thought this was a good sign.

The trail stayed close to the escarpment that bounded Kodachrome Basin on the north. It wound in and out of alcoves and indentations in the cliffs. It passed close to several impressive, free-standing spires. There are about fifty of them in the park. And of course all of the rocks were bold, bright colors. The place is called Kodachrome Basin for a reason. There were lots of opportunities for photos, with the red rocks contrasting with the blue sky above and the green vegetation at the base of the cliffs.

We walked right by the base of Fred Flintstone Spire, which I didn't think looked much like Fred Flintstone, and Ballerina Spire, which didn't look like a ballerina. But I thought they were cool names anyway. We made a short side trip to Indian Cave, where the stone is so soft that handprints have been worn into the rock over the years.

We took a spur trail to Secret Passage, which is a very short slot canyon. It was somewhat confusing because the area was crisscrossed with social trails where people had explored the nearby rock formations. For much of the way, the route crossed slick rock, just marked with cairns or the scuff marks of boots on the stone. When I paused to take photos in the slot canyon Sandy got ahead and went out of sight around a corner. I hurried to catch up but after a few minutes of hustling I still couldn't see her. Oh, oh. We must have gone different ways. I doubled back and started calling. I was just beginning to get nervous when we found each other about five minutes later. We resolved to make sure we stayed in sight of each other the rest of the way. We didn't want to have to hike back to the trailhead separately. Plus all the snacks were in my pack.

At one point the trail did a few short switchbacks to drop down into a drainage. After we reached the bottom, the tracks we were following in the sandy soil gradually started to fade. I had a strong feeling of deja vu. It was just like when we were on the Cassidy Arch Trail a few days before. We figured that we must have missed a switchback at some point. Obviously lots of other people had too. Now we were following their tracks.

The wash we were in was narrow and the sides were not very steep dirt that was only about ten feet high. I climbed up and over the side and there was the nice, maintained trail. It was only about twenty feet away but had been hidden by the sides of the wash. Sandy scrambled up to join me and we were back on track again, no harm done. Well, except for some soil erosion where we climbed out of the wash. Hopefully there won't be any park rangers who read this.

The last spur we took was to Cool Cave. It was really a box canyon and not a cave, but it was very cool, both physically and aesthetically. But the shade that kept the temperature down didn't make for good photos, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

After Cool Cave the trail started circling back to the trailhead. Here the route moved away from the base of the cliffs into the center of the basin. It gave a different perspective on the cliffs, a wider view of them from a greater distance. We reached the junction for the final and longest spur trail, the one to Panorama Point, and thought, nah. We were already in "get back to the car" mode. When we finished, the official stats from the AllTrails app and my GPS were 6.2 miles, 574 feet of elevation gain and 2 hours and 47 minutes hiking time. It was long enough to be a workout but not so long as to wear us out. An excellent hike with some great scenery.

Of course we stopped at the visitor center on the way out as planned. I got a tshirt. Sandy got a jacket. Both had Kodachrome Basin logos on them, of course. And we both got a drink and some ice cream to hold us till we could get lunch. Which we needed because we had one more stop that we wanted to make before heading back to civilization - Grosvenor Arch. From the turnoff to the park, it's about ten miles further down the rough dirt road heading away from town.

The ten miles took us about half an hour, but it was worth it though. From the small parking area, it was only a few hundred yards to a viewpoint. It's a unique double arch, the larger of the two being almost a hundred feet across. We took lots of photos before heading back. When we reached Cannonville and US12, we turned and went about two miles west to Tropic, which had a couple of restaurants to choose from. We ate at the Rustler's Restaurant where we had a nice lunch before driving back to our hotel in Escalante. It was our last night there. Next we would travel on to Bryce Canyon.