Cliffhouse Arch

I recently put up some photos on Photosynth from my earlier hike down the Escalante River in 2008.  This is a really cool way to look a scenery, especially rock art.

Here is the link for this set of photos.  For more of these, especially rock art, try this link.  Enjoy!

Backpacking to Neon Canyon, May 2010

Last May, my brother Kendall, my son Evan, and I backpacked into Neon Canyon for three days and two nights.

Neon Canyon is a box canyon tributary to the Escalante River and is accessed from the Egypt trailhead off of the Hole in the Rock Road, south of Escalante, Utah.

Neon Canyon in May

BYU lets out in April and I am done teaching for the academic year. My son, Evan, and I are off to the canyons of the Escalante again. The Alpine School District is still in session until the end of May, so this outing will not involve my younger kids.

Rather than head back to lower Coyote Gulch (for the 4th time since last April), we are planning on visiting Neon Canyon and the slot canyons in the upper part of Coyote Gulch.

We will be heading out on a Thursday early in the morning and the plan is to make it to the trailhead at Egypt and hike the 3 to 4 miles down to the Escalante River to camp near Neon Canyon. We'll explore it the next day, along with Ringtail Slot and then hike back to the truck. The hike is detailed nicely here. Details of some possible technical canyoneering (which we will not be doing) are available here and here.

We'll car camp somewhere along the Hole-in-the-Rock road on Friday night and head to the Dry Fork of Coyote Gulch to visit the slot canyons there. There are four to visit, Dry Fork, Peek-a-boo, Spooky Gulch, and Brimstone Gulch. Further downstream from Brimstone there is also some rock art, which we may visit if we have time.

Lizard Eats Lizard

Photo by Mike Conrad

Hiking out of Coyote Gulch this past Friday morning, we ran across a pair of lizards right in the middle of the trail in Hurricane Wash. One was a big Long-Nosed Leopard Lizard, about 8 inches from snout to hind legs. She was obviously a female because she had bright orange stripes that only appear on females during the mating season. The one being eaten, or at least attacked, was a Tiger Whiptail and while almost as long from nose to tail, was substantially smaller.

This was one of the most unique things I have ever seen in the outdoors. Both these lizards are normally quite shy, but here they were in the middle of the trail wrestling, one for dear life.

Mike & Braden Conrad got some photos and Scott Preston got photos and some video. In the middle of all the commotion, a third lizard showed up for some unexplained reason. As near as I can figure it was an Orange-Headed Spiny Lizard. We only got video of it, however, and it's hard to tell for sure.

I posted a video of the whole episode on You Tube at the following URL - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1HbgHBrQu0.

Coyote Gulch Pictograph Panel

The Central Figures

The pictograph panel in lower Coyote Gulch is located about half a mile downstream from Coyote Natural Bridge. It is located on the north wall of the canyon at the top of a sandy hill. There is a very clear path running up the hill to the panel.

I have posted all the photos I took here on my rock art webpage.

Most of the images are pictographs painted on the rock, but there is a faint hourglass shapped figure scratched into the rock. Also something that looks like a pair of horns that have been pecked into the rock deeper than the scratching.

The art shows a Fremont influence. At least the light grey-yellow painted figures which are similar to the horned figures found in Fremont rock art. The other figures are more difficult to place, especially for an amatuer like myself. In some cases, like the object we labelled the tennis racquet, the red pigment looks older than the grey. But in the case of what Dave called, "The Chief", the red looks just as recent as the grey.

When we looked around we noticed that someone had piled up some of the stones in the area to look like a low wall. I am skeptical that this is authentic, but the stones may have well been builiding block of earlier structures. We also found two circles that had numerous bits of corn cob, squash rind, bone, and hard flints. One was inside the low wall. The other was in what looked like a fire ring, but some of the rocks in the ring were actually adobe, not stone. Again, I suspect these have not been lying here like this for hundreds of years. Most likely they are objects that hikers have run across and deposited here since they saw earlier hikers had done so. Dave raised an interesting question though, why hasn't somebody just walked off with all this stuff? Perhaps they have, just not all of it. Or do Coyote Gulch hikers have enough civic virtue to only look and not steal? At least two do.

Looking around the shelf where these two circles were (located under a slight overhang to the west of the panel) we noticed little bits of black charcoal mixed in with the sand. Even a casual observer can see that this site was occupied in some form in the past.

In order to find out more about the site I checked out two published articles. One is a paper by Phil R. Geib, entitled "New Evidence for the Antiquity of Fremont Occupation in Glen Canyon, South-central Utah." The other is an anthropological paper from the University Of Utah written in 1959 by James H. Gunnerson, entitled "1957 Excavations, Glen Canyon Area."

Gunnerson reports on excavations at three sites in Coyote Gulch, but the sites are all several miles upstream from the pictograph panel. Geib reports on radiocarbon dating from the richest site there, called the Alvey site, and from four other sites in the Escalante drainage. I have not been able to find any published information on this particular site, so it may not have ever been excavated. Nonetheless, information about the other sites sheds light on who was living in the area and when.

Gieb finds evidence from his radiocarbone dating that the Fremont were well-entrenched in the area, raising corn & squash and using pottery during the period from 200 AD to 900 AD. This date is a bit earlier than previous researchers had hypothesised. The Alvey site consisted of three layers the middle of which corresponds to this time period. The top layer had objects of both Fremont and Anasazi origin mixed together. This indicates that the Anasazi appeared here after the Fremont. The most common dates I have come across for the Anasazi are in the range of 1000 to 1250 AD.

According to Don Montoya, Museum Curator at the Anasazi State Park Museum in Boulder, UT, there is rock art scattered through this general area dating back as far as 5500 BC. So, the figures that are not obviously Fremont could be archaic or Anasazi. Or perhaps of some other orgin altogether.

Bottom line is that the side trip up the sandy hill is well worth the effort. The pictographs are in excellent condition and you can get up fairly close to them to see what they look like.

Dave Spencer at the Panel

I am informed by Dave who was informed by other knowledgable sources named Elliot, that there is another well-known pictograph panel in the Gulch. When we were hiking in I saw a well-worn trail high up the side of the canyon on another sand hill that I suspected might lead to pictographs or a cliff dwelling. Perhaps this is where they are.

I found a photo of a different panel on Flickr. Perhaps this is the other site

Update

I enhanced the contrast on one of the photos and reproduce it below:

It looks to me like there are two more faintly scratched figures here. The "tennis racquet" is painted over the top of one. On closer examination, it may be that it was scratched over the top of the racquet. If fact, it may have been painted, but if so the paint has mostly worn off. The other is just to the right of the central white horned figure. You can make out the horns to the right of its head.
Actually, all the easily visible figures look like they are painted on top of or around older, fainter ones.
Another Update
Here are two photos that show the main figures in the panel. One show where I think there are faint horned hourglass figures. Maybe I'm just seeing things, though.


And I have an opinion from an expert as well. Dr. Renee Barlow from the CEU Prehistory Museum in Price says in an email:

"It is quite beautiful, and does appear to be somewhat impressionistic with elements resembling Fremont figures. I think though, that overall the panel does not look like typical Fremont rock art in this region, so it may be difficult to assign a definitive cultural affiliation. If the rock art were dated, that would help of course."

Report on Hiking Coyote Gulch

Jacob Hamblin Arch from Downstream

The backpacking trip to Coyote Gulch went off without a hitch this week. OK, it went off with only minor hitches.

After much debate, we opted to go in via the trailhead near Chimney Rock, rather than the climb down the slickrock near Jacob Hamblin Arch. This added a couple of miles to the hike in, but the descent was relatively gradual and the scenery was great. It required route finding over the sand and slickrock for about a mile or so from the trailhead into Hurricane Wash, but the entry was easy to spot after cresting a ridge after a half mile. The descent over the slickrock into the wash was a bit round about to avoid potholes and such, but not difficult.

The young men from my church group are planning on doing an overnighter here in June. Dave's son is also thinking about taking his scouts here sometime in the future. So with this in mind I wrote up some thoughts on how one might approach this hike with young men and only one night in the gulch.

We hiked in a little past Jacob Hamblin Arch near the base of the slickrock exit there. The park service has installed a two-seat composting toilet there because it is such a popular site. Many people like to camp there before climbing out along the ridge the next morning. We counted 4-5 different groups in the general area.

Dave brought bratwurst for dinner which he had frozen before the trip and they were nicely thawed by dinner time.

The next day we hiked downstream further with daypacks and the going was much easier. We made it about four miles downstream at a very leisurely pace. The highlights included several beautiful cascades and waterfalls, a natural bridge, a cliffside arch, and a stunning set of pictographs. I will devote a whole post to the pictographs later, but in the meantime you can view all the photos at my website.

The trail was very easy to follow. The only semi-tough spots were a boulder field just upstream of Cliff Arch, and a pair of waterfalls just downstream of Cliff Arch. You need to bypass the later two, but the trail was easy to miss and we ended up above the lower falls with a 15 foot drop or scramble down and no obvious way back up. A group of French hikers came up from below while we were eating lunch there and we just sort of shrugged at each other. We couldn't find a way down and they couldn't find a way up.

We turned around at this point because I was getting tired and Dave was starting to feel blisters on his feet. This turned out to be a good idea because the blisters were more serious than he thought initially.

We hiked out the next morning the way we had come in. The climb out of Hurricane Wash was a beast. We knew the general direction was almost directly due east, but the trailhead is not visible from the wash and you have to take a twisting route up through the slickrock to avoid the really steep spots and the potholes. We did not take a waypoint reading at the trailhead and this turned out to be a big mistake. Instead, we read off the coordinates from the map. These are 37º 24' 59" N and 111º 05' 54" W. However we made a typing error and put in 25' rather than 24'. That turns out to be 1.15 miles north of the trailhead. So after climbing out of the wash we took a heading on the GPS and headed off to the NW rather than due west. This took us to much higher terrain and over some steep sandy ground. I was pretty pooped out by the time we crested the ridge. Dave got there first and said, "Well, if there was a truck out there I would see it for sure and I don't see one." The truck was about a half mile to our SW, however, and about 90 degress off the heading we had been taking. The rest of the way was pretty easy, but we were both exhausted by the time we got back to the truck.

To top everything off, the truck would not start. Everything was totally dead. Its a quirk of the vehicle (since repaired) that the battery connector occasionally comes loose, so you have to pop the hood and jiggle it around to get a good connection. I knew this and wan't too worried, but I think Dave was for at least a little bit.

All in all it was a wonderful trip. The scenery was stunning and the hiking was fun despite the challenges. The pictographs were a very pleasant surprize, much better than expected. More on that later.

Idiots We?

Not this week. Well not as much as we could be anyway.

This was my truck this morning as I left for work.


The forecasts for Escalante, UT (the closest town to Coyote Gulch) are mixed, but apparently it is snowing there this morning and the temps are in the teens. The rest of the week looks dry, but it seems likely that the overnight temps in the gulch will be well below freezing. And there is wind in the forecast. None of these are unsurmountable obstacles, of course, but the whole point of going is to enjoy the trip, not to build character by overcoming adversity. (This will not stop me from claiming I overcame a great deal of adversity, but I don't actually want to experience any.) So after a lengthy conversation of less than 5 minutes this morning, we both decided to postpone the trip until later in the month when the weather MAY be better.

Here's the National Weather Service forecast as of 9:00 a.m.:

• Tuesday: Sunny, with a high near 56. West northwest wind between 3 and 11 mph.
• Tuesday Night: A 30 percent chance of rain, mainly after midnight. Partly cloudy, with a low around 30. West northwest wind between 10 and 13 mph.
• Wednesday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 51. Breezy, with a west northwest wind 10 to 13 mph increasing to between 19 and 22 mph.
• Wednesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 26.
• Thursday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 61.
• Thursday Night: A slight chance of rain. Partly cloudy, with a low around 33.
• Friday: A chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 60.

These lows are for the town of Escalante, the canyon at Coyote Gulch gets less sun, so it will be a bit colder.

Further Plans for Coyote Gulch

Having decided the the Jacob Hamblin Arch entrance to lower Coyote Gulch is perhaps "Kerkable", I have been turning my attention to other sites in the area.

Right now the plan is to hike in on Tuesday afternoon and camp somewhere close to the entrance under an overhanging cliff, if possible. On Wednesday (the day that looks most likely to be wet according to the forecasts today) we will hike downstream to the Escalante and Stevens Arch and back. On Thursday we will sightsee upstream in the morning and then hike out around noon or so. We'll drive back north and stop to see four scenic gulches in upper Coyote Gulch. We will either camp near the truck, or perhaps near one of the gulches. We'll walk through them on Thursay afternoon and Friday morning before heading back home

Here are descriptions of each of them:

Dry Fork of Coyote Gulch
Peekaboo Gulch
Spooky Gulch
Brimstone Gulch

Getting Ready for Coyote Gulch

I am off backpacking with a colleague from work next week at Coyote Gulch in the Escalante drainage north of Lake Powell in Southern Utah. This is a pretty popular destination and so there are lots of decriptions of the hike. One of the most popular routes is to drive to the trailhead along Forty Mile Ridge and walk about 2 miles to the rim of the Escalante Canyon. Here there is a crack in the wall that will take you down 15-20 feet or so to the top of a large sand dune. You can see this very clearly on Google Maps below.


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The exit that seems to be most often used is a ridge of sandstone just east of Jacob Hamblin Arch, at the center of the map below:


View Larger Map

My colleague talked with his son, who has done the hike before, and he said that going in and out this route is, "doable". Now, I know that doable for him is not the same as doable for me, but he also realizes that this is true for his dad, my colleague. So he and his brother invented the term, "dadable", meaning my colleague could do it. He says the route is "dadable". My question is whether or not the route is "Kerkable", which I define as "can be done in a wheelchair."

I have been looking around for some indication via text or photos of what this way in and out looks like. I found the following today:

• Here's a group the came in from the north along the spine of Jacob Hamblin Arch and out the south along the path we would take. It's hard to tell how difficult they thought it was since it was a bit anticlimactic compared to climbing the arch. http://www.tumtum.com/climbing/trips/Escalante98_part2.shtml
  
• Here's a discription of the typical route: in through the crack in the wall and out via the slickrock climb. This one has some good photos of the way out. http://braydenslife.blogspot.com/2007/10/coyote-gulch-4-day-hike.html
  
• Another account of this route from someone who is a bit more skeptical about the ease of this route out. http://bristleconepine.blogspot.com/2007/05/coyote-gulch-in-may.html

UPDATE 3/25

• Here is a video from YouTube showing a couple of people climbing out of Coyote Gulch via the sandstone fin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OjD2AIRpB0
• This the first group above on another trip a few years later that went in and out this route. They call it "the slabs". They also came down the spine of Jacob Hamblin Arch on their way out. http://www.tumtum.com/climbing/trips/Escalante01_part1.shtml

Natural Arch Website

I ran across a really cool website for anyone who might be interested in natural arches. The site is http://www.archmillennium.net/ and is maintained by Guilain Debossens.

Southern Utah has thousands of natural arches and I love looking at them and photographing them. If you look at this site under the "special areas" tag on the left-hand side you can find hundreds of links to pages with photos of natural arches from all over the world. There are quite a few sections devoted to parts of Utah and the Four Corners area.

Here is his shot of Cliff House Arch in the Escalante River Canyon a few miles upstream from the highway 12 bridge. This is taken from the rim of the canyon, right next to the arch.

Here is one of my photos of the same arch from the canyon floor.

And here is the satellite view courtesy of Google Maps.

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Hiking the Escalante River Canyon

This is a relatively easy hike along the Escalante River through some very beautiful scenery. I went with the boy scouts on this one last June. The upper trailhead is just outside the town of Escalante and the trailhead at the other end is by the bridge where highway 12 crosses the river at Calf Creek. You can do the hike in a day, but it's alot of walking and you wouldn't have much time to explore or enjoy the scenery. Most people do it in two days. We took three.

You will need to register for a backcountry permit at the interagency visitor's center in Escalante if you are planing on staying overnight. You should also be prepared to utilize Leave No Trace principles, which in Escalante Canyon includes no open fires and pack out your toilet paper.

The hike divides easily into two parts of roughly equal length: 1) from Escalante to the Death Hollow and 2) from Death Hollow to Calf Creek.

Escalante to Death Hollow

For the first part, the canyon is much narrower than further down and the stream is much smaller. I suspect the main reason is that much of the water that used to flow down the Escalante here is now siphoned off for use in the town of Escalante.

There are at least three native American pictograph panels located in the first two and half miles of the hike. The first is located just over a mile in, on the north side of one of the big loops the river makes. Look for a couple of large trees on the west side of the stream and you'll see a clear path from there to the cliff face where the petroglyphs are carved. There are at least two spots here with pictographs, so look around and be sure you see both. Look behind the brushes growing next to the clearly visible panels as there are some carvings that are hidden.

First Pictograph Site

The second site is located downstream on the next loop in the river, at almost the exact same spot in the loop, the northwest. This one is smaller and has some more modern additions.

Second Pictograph Site

The third site is located two more bends down the river in a huge alcove on the north side of the river. It's impossible to miss. This alcove is so big and so obviously a great shelter, you wonder why the Anasazi didn't build a big complex here like they did at Mesa Verde. On a follow up hike just after Thanksgiving with my family, I discovered at least a partial answer. This site gets no direct sun in the Winter.

The pictographs here are in pretty bad shape and look to have been restored at some time. The more you look around the more you can tell that this site used to be covered in graffiti, but it has been scrubbed away. Who knows what other Fremont or Anazai pictographs were here before the graffiti was scawled all over? The main art is a series of four figures linked arm-to-arm at the back. It is unmissable. There are some other figures a few feet to the left and some very small ones on the wall at the far right in the back of the alcove.

Third Pictograph Site

The other interesting thing here is the hard sand that forms the floor of the alcove. Where it drops off into the stream bed people have carved all sorts of faniciful things into the five-foot high sand cliff.

The alcove from aross the river and slightly downstream

This is a good place to camp if you have the time. If you are trying to do the hike in two days, you should keep on hiking. The water in the river slowly dwindles and completely disappears a few miles below this site, so your next best camping spot is at the mouth of Death Hollow. The spot marked on my map above with the red circle had no water, so don't plan on camping there.

The hike from the alcove to the mouth of Death Hollow is 4 to 4.5 miles and the section about a mile upstream from the confluence is especially impressive. The hiking is easy all along this route, but especially so here since there is no water in the riverbed.

Be sure to take some time and hike at least some small distance up Death Hollow. The banks have patches of poison ivy, so your best route is to walk up in the middle of the stream bed. The canyon is very spectacular and it would be a shame to miss it after coming all this way.

Death Hollow to Calf Creek

The hike from Death Hollow to Sand Creek is a bit harder, but still not very hard. The biggest impediment, if you are backpacking, is the river crossings. The river is no longer dry and its not a little stream you can jump across like it is at the begining of the hike. Plan on getting your feet wet. The banks are steep and very sandy. Going down is easy, climbing up the opposite bank is a real pain. Most people give up and just hike along the stream bed. It's slower going and the loops in the river make it longer, but its much more pleasant, especially if you are in no particular hurry.

Two and half miles downstream from Death Hollow, the river makes a big southern loop. The south side of the canyon is a towering sheer cliff, and the river bottom is covered with trees growing in soft white sand. This would make a good campsite if you were on an extended trip.

The Sandy Loop

Another mile below this Sand Creek joins the Escalante from a canyon to the north. The canyon is much wider here and the trail is well-defined. The hiking is easier on the trail than in the river. About a half mile below Sand Creek there is a huge natural arch on the south wall of the canyon. To the east of this is an alcove in the cliff high above the canyon wall with several Anasazi cliff houses in it. This is also a good place to camp.

The Natural Arch

Alcove with Cliff Houses

Another half mile downstream from here, hidden in shadows on the south side of the canyon, is Ecalante Natural Bridge. The shadows make it difficult to photograph, but it is easy to see and you can walk up underneath it with a little effort.
From here it is another two miles to the trailhead at Calf Creek. If you have time and energy left over you can follow a trail from the parking lot up onto the north side of the canyon and see the Hundred Hands pictograph. A walk downstream below the bridge for a couple hundred yards or so will allow you a view of another cliff house on the north side of the canyon.
This is a fun hike through some spectacular country and it's relatively easy with not much up and down. You could spend days exploring here if you wanted to.
For a more detailed, higher resolution version of the maps here, try this link.
Here are a couple of handouts from the visitor's center:

• What to expect when hiking in the area.
• Leave No Trace guidelines for Escalante Canyon.

Escalante Photos

These photos are from Thanksgiving vacation in Panguitch, Utah. They were taken in Calf Creek Canyon and Escalante Canyon in Escalante - Grand Staircase National Monument.

Escalante Canyon downstream from the town of Escalante about a mile or so, near the 1st set of pictographs. This is looking east, or downstream, from the wall near the pictographs. The photo was my wife, Yeongmi's, idea and the sky and lighting turned out fantastic.

The same tree as above, but from a different angle, slightly further east and across the river/creek.

A cliff face in the same area.

A butte about halfway between the Calf Creek campground trailhead and Lower Calf Creek Falls.

The "Three Men" pictographs on the east side of the canyon slightly upstream from the above photo.

A cliff house in a side canyon just a bit further upstream on the west side of Calf Creek.

Lower Calf Creek Falls. An unbelievably beautiful location - a bit of green paradise in the desert.

Pictographs in Calf Creek Canyon

My daughter and I went hiking the day after Thanksgiving in Calf Creek Canyon in Escalante - Grand Staircase National Monument in southern Utah. We drove over in the late morning from Panguitch where we were spending the holiday with my sister and her family and started hiking around noon. The weather had been rain and snow earlier in the week, but thing cleared up nicely for the hike and the sun was shining most of the time. This hike is very popular and the parking lot at the trailhead was full by the time we got there.

We were about a mile into the hike when we started looking on the opposite canyon wall (to the east) for pictographs. We thought we saw some faint ones, but weren't sure. So I pulled out the telephoto lens to get a better look, but we still couldn't tell for sure. Just to be safe I took a couple of photos to look at later.

As we continued up the trail, my daughter spotted the pictographs we were looking for - a group of three figures in a row clearly visible on a cliff face across the canyon. I got some shots of these too and we continued the hike.

When we got back to a computer and I uploaded the photos we noticed that the faint markings we originally saw were, indeed, pictographs. In fact there were at least a dozen of them, but we would never have seen them without the telephoto shots.

This is the image that first caught our eye. Notice the fainter images to the right with the yellow tint.

This image is located to the left of the one above. I enhanced the contrast to make it easier to see the sheep.

This is a wider view of the whole area. If you look carefully you can see several faint images here.

For higher resolution views of these and other photos visit the url below.

http://kerk.pomosa.com/myphotos/indian_rock_art.htm

The alcove where these pictographs are located in the center of the Google Maps box below. The more visible "Three Men" pictograoh is in the alcove immediately to the northwest.

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