This trip I had been meaning to do for some years, and this year I got my chance. Had my last night of work in Park City and two days later I was pushing off and going under the HWY 24 bridge at Hanksville. 8 days later I came out of a windstorm, dragged my duckie onto a pile of rocks below the Dirty Devil campsite, crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep. Did the shuttle the next day and headed off to Junction, getting ready for a visit home before the Grand Canyon.
Needless to say, despite all that was said and done, and all the journals I wrote, I have not yet had time to write a proper story about this amazing trip. This will suffice for now, and hopefully I will find more time this summer. Until then, the one thing I will say, is that you should not do this trip in 8 days. 8 days gets you covered for the paddling. But you need more than that to do the many hikes. 10 should be a minimum...
The first picture above is of the put in on Muddy Creek, very low flows. Just up stream from the Hwy 24 Dirty Devil Bridge. Made the shuttle on the way back easier to park here than if I was parked at the road further downstream. However the dragging may not have been worth it!
First night Camp, Navajo sandstone just begining to appear
The Dirty Devil is actually pretty clear water if you let it settle out? Can you drink it? Never figured that out but would be good to know. Vernon Pick got arsenic poisoning from drinking Muddy Creek, after all, but most of the rivers' flow right now is coming from the Fremont....
Day 2. Mud flats. Braidy shallow river. Hard to find the right channel. Hardest river I ever tried to read. Spent more time walking the boat than sitting in it.
A slotty slot.
Camp night two. Opposite a pretty side canyon (Pasture Canyon?) that went very far back. This is the Lower Sand Slide area I believe. Sometime in the night my map blew away so I'm not really sure where anything else is.
Same camp, pleasantly illuminated by evening sunlight. Sandy beach, but prickly from Burrs and Tumbleweed pieces. Went barefoot anyway. River right above the rim is called the Burr Desert. Burrs Blow. And Eastern Utah is windy. That's the Navajo Sandstone.
This is called Pasture Canyon, I believe. True to its name, nice water, but covered in cow dung and the soil trodden all over by numerous hooves.
Rattlesnake on the sand above camp night three. How to deal with rattle snake in camp. Use channel locks. Pick up fire pan and place it between your bed and the snake. Put more wood on the fire so it will last for a while. Go to bed. Snake usually doesn't crawl over the fire to attack you. Snake hangs out somewhere else and the next day has his whole beach back to himself.
Pretty stars. Night time shot night three. Midway through day 3 the river became pretty consistently runnable. After that you'd only have to get out to re-position the boat if it started to take the wrong channel.
Day 4.
Nice little Oasis for desert Critters up a side canyon day 4.
Nice side canyon day four with water. Cliffs of Wingate Sandstone capped by Kayenta. Navajo cliffs in distant background.
View downstream from camp night 4.
River rounded cobbles on a terrace high above the current river level.
This spire is exactly the kind of thing Wingate Sandstone is bound to do once its Kayenta cap erodes off. If you are trying to figure out if you're looking at a Wingate or Navajo cliff, remember when uncapped, the Navajo weathers into rounded smooth surfaces, and the Wingate forms spires and crumble rough blocks.
Night 5? The river is finally getting narrow.
Large pieces of petrified wood all over the terraces. From the Chinle FM. Petrified Forest Member? A lot of petrified wood all over from here on out.
Camp site Night 5. Rock on hard right, I believe is the White Rim Sandstone.
Put sticks in the river to see if the level goes up at night, or, heaven forbid- starts to shrink. Some nights it went up a little.
Cutler FM river level. Notice foreground River Right, grey rock is a thin band of lime stone. Deeper down is mostly inter tonging beach or offshore sand bars (cedar mesa) with stream deposits (culter). The Limestone is unique and interesting, somewhere in the marine / river delta tug of war the sea must have been deep enough for some limestone to accumulate.
About day 6 you start getting a lot of these little class one rapids. Unlike the earlier sandy bottom you dragged your boat across these have rocky cobbles in them. Often where it looked shallow I got out and just walked the boat holding on to the stern line, so as to minimize draft as well as higher velocity impacts / scrapes with rocks that would have happened if I was going with the flow.
(Notice cross bedding in cedar mesa sandstone on cliff in left, and also notice patch of white. The cedar mesa SS is white, but the overlying culter leaches down a red coloring over it, just like the redwall limestone in the grand canyon is actually grey, but only gets its red color from the pigments in the overlying supai group. You gotta look carefully at the rock around here, can't take colors for granted.)
Nice and Narrow. Cedar Mesa Sandstone, I believe.
Day 6. Permian time. Nice narrow runnable river.
Looking up a wingate cliff, water eroded wash. Must be a beautiful waterfall sometimes.
That's my boat.
Night 6 campsite.
Nice side canyon. First cottonwoods I saw in a while. The wash occasionally waters things here when it rains, but the water that formed the pool that these trees are drinking is actually supplied by seeps in the sandstone.
Little tiny molecules of water can spend years and years and years working their way down in between grains of sand in sandstones. Throughout the Colorado Plateau these seaps come out here and there. It's usually quite visible in cliff forming sandstones, such as the cedar mesa or the navajo, and usually vegetation is sprouting out at such places. Rarely however, is there enough left over that doesn't evaporate for animals, as well as plants, to drink. Such places are rather special indeed.
Morning 7. No bridge in site. Many more miles of meanders to go. Pretty Country. Interfingering cedar mesa sandstone and culter fm, I think.
(Same cyclical white and red banding that is responsible for the coloring of the spires in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. Here, a different hydrologic history has resulted in different erosional patterns, but a few spires here and there still can be found)
The lower canyon through the silt was kinda unpleasant with the branches and roots clawing at you and the dead cows pinned under the rocks filtering the river through their insides. This part looked kinda nice though.
Improvised camp in a crag on lake powell. Too windy to make it to the Cataract Canyon "dirty devil" take out. Was long day, 7 hours paddling, to make it here. Munched on a bagel and feel asleep. Toilets and small campground just above cliff on right. Took out there the next day after hitching the shuttle. A mouse got in my food and nibbled on some bagel.
Yours Truly.
No comments:
Post a Comment