Ever since middle school I have had a reoccurring dream. It consists of me walking up the ramp in the hall of Dixie Middle School. I am fully clothed, my face is in tact. In fact, the only thing that makes this dream stand out is everyone else is going down the ramp. There is a sea of people going the opposite direction while I desperately try to go against the flow, much like a spawning salmon. Everyone in the dream is happy and moving the direction that seems to make sense, but for some reason I know I don’t want to go where they are headed.
I fell in love with my current wife, not that first one that was a disaster, for a lot of reasons but there were two that were huge.
First and for most, she did not have a problem with my signature hair style that was a Krishna tail and bald head. I know she didn’t have a problem with it because that was the look I was rocking when I met her. Now she is forced to deal with my overzealous beard. Second, I quickly learned that she didn’t care too much about what everyone else was doing and kind of just did what made sense to her. This was appealing to me because it’s the way I have tried to live my life, living by my rules.
Well, as two people who are willing to go against the grain and in this case all sanity. KB and I set off for our first backpacking trip of the season. Most people would do something easy and close to home as a warm up for the season. Not us, we jumped in the Mooseknuckler-mobile and headed to Hole-in-the-Rock road. Once we were about 40 miles from anything paved, we unboarded said mobile and dawned our packs. Our goal, to make it to the Escalante River in one day. That’s 14 miles of hiking through sand, water and rock, but mostly just sand and water. If we were successful we would then have to turn around and walk all the way back out. Yup, all of those 14 miles making our round trip 28 miles in two days.
It seemed like a reasonable and good plan.
We had hoped to leave the MCA World Headquarters around 5 am Sunday morning. We left at 7. Then we stopped at the Escalanate Outfitters and then had to drive the hour or so on the dirt road to get to our starting point. All of this meant that we began hiking at about 11:30 on Sunday. Undeterred, we moved with as much quickness as possible. Anyone who has tried to carry a loaded pack through sand knows that this equates to about no miles an hour and a lot of frustration. Luckily the stream appears about a mile in and the sand became wet and easier to move on. But then of course we had to navigate stream crossings every couple of hundred yards.
This stream continues all the way to our end point, the confluence of Coyote Gulch and the Escalante River. The Gulch is a sandstone maze carved by this small stream. Most of the hike the walls are undercut leaving a towering sandstone pinnacle that blocks out the sun. The wind has cut several arches along the way and the river dug through one of these walls leaving a natural bridge. This bridge is aptly named, Natural Bridge. Of all the arches I saw and have seen, this one was just cool. Walking under the bridge was other-worldly. Most arches you just get to see, but this one we were forced to navigate.
Speaking of arches, we stopped for lunch after about three hours of hiking at the edge of Jacob Hamblin Arch. This one is wind created and the river goes all the way around it letting us see it from both sides. After three hours of solid trekking, we were pretty hungry. The Ramen Noodles tasted pretty damn good and we refilled our water bottles before loading our mules (us) and heading on. This arch is maybe a half mile past the confluence of Coyote Gulch and Hurricane Wash which was six miles into our 14 mile day. At this point, I had switched my hiking shoes for sandles and was beginning to question that decision.
We pushed on.
We left from our lunch spot at 3:50. This left us about four hours of daylight left, plenty to hit the Escalante. Unfortunately our pace slowed.
One of the things I like to do that goes against that crowd, is listen to punk rock and go to punk rock shows. About 9 months ago, we attended the Dropkick Murphys show in Vegas. After said concert, I could barely walk. My right foot swelled up like a tomato and limping forward in lunges of pain became my method of pedestrian travel. After putting on my Chacos it took about an hour before my feet began to feel tired. And then my heels really started to hurt. At about 4:30 my right foot started to have pains reminiscent of that punk rock show’s aftermath. I continued not wanting to slow KB’s pace and keep her from her goal.
At about 4:50 KB got sick. Sick enough for her to start wanting to stop. At this point I was hobbling along like a senior citizen trying to make queu at Golden Corral. My limping caught her attention and by 5 we were anxiously looking for a place to camp.
Once stopped, we both just crashed onto the sand. After a few minutes, I hobbled over and unloaded our sleeping pads. Then we fell asleep. After our quick power nap, we ate. At this point, hobbling was a fast verb for what I was doing. Nonetheless, we ate, filled the bottles and relaxed. We took in our surroundings while bathing in the shade of the cottonwoods we were resting under. Around 7 pm we felt rested enough to explore our surrounding a bit. We hiked up the side of the canyon so we could see where we were. It happens we were about 100 yards from Cliff Arch and the waterfalls at the base. Two things we had been hoping to see. We saw them from above and then retreated back to our sleeping pads were we remained until the next morning.
I woke up with the sun. Lying in the comfort of my sleeping bag, my feet felt fine. And then I stood up. The hike out was going to be a long and arduous one. I had two options, hike out or somehow die. Walking out seemed like the better of the options so I pulled my boots on, snugged ’em up real tight and proceeded to spend the next two hours pretending my foot didn’t kill me every time I stepped on it. By the time we made it back to the Hurricane Wash, I broke down and took some Advil. I didn’t want to do drugs but my foot made me.
It took about 15 minutes for the drugs to kick in. My right foot stopped hurting and my left thought, what the hell why don’t I try this for a while. So I spent the rest of the trip pretending that my left foot didn’t hurt as bad as my right. I guess that’s one way to keep your mind off of the pain.
We climbed out of the desolate wash and to our mobile at about 2 pm. We didn’t meet anyone who had recently lost their girlfriend. However, we stumbled upon a man running in the opposite direction with a sheepish look on his face. When he couldn’t ignore our looks of worry any more, he finally said, “I got walking and forgot my pack.”
And even better, there was no crowd of middle-schoolers rushing down the hill as we tried to climb it. There was only a family of five that looked really out of place and who were concerned with how desolate the wash was…
I have a photographic memory so here are the photographs of the trip in gallery form.
