"The Hayduke Trail is an extremely challenging, 800-mile backcountry route through some of the most
rugged and breathtaking landscapes on earth. Located entirely on public land, the trail links six of the
National Parks on the Colorado Plateau in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona with the lesser known, but
equally splendid, lands in between them. Encompassed in the route are Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef,
Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks as well as Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and numerous National Forests, BLM Districts,
Primitive Areas, Wilderness Areas and Wilderness Study Areas. The Hayduke Trail is not intended to be
the easiest or most direct route through this incredibly varied terrain, but is rather meant to showcase the
stunning Redrock Wilderness of the American Southwest."
-www.hayduketrail.org
The Hayduke Trail traverses one of the last great wildernesses of the United States. It spans two vertical miles in elevation range from the bottom of the Grand Canyon at 1,800 ft to the top of Mount Ellen in the Henry Mountains at 11,522 ft. While some of the travel is on dirt roads or established hiking trails, much of the Hayduke Trail traverses untrailed slickrock, slot canyons, washes, rivers, thick vegetation, quicksand, sand dunes, scree slopes, cliffs, and even alpine peaks. As such it requires keen navigational skills, excellent fitness, and proven capability over sometimes rough or exposed terrain. The landscape can be harsh. Water, too much or not enough, is the desert's mantra out here. It is possible to go days without seeing a single water source only to have a torrential downpour trap you on the wrong side of a vicious flash flood. Depending on the time of year, the temperature can range over 100°F while hiking the trail. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, coyotes, mountain lions, bears, cacti, and poison ivy all may be encountered.
The Hayduke Trail was first conceived by Joe Mitchell and Mike Coronella back in 1998. The first through-hike of the "trail" wasn't until 2005 by Brian Frankle. Unlike the Pacific Crest Trail or Appalachian Trail (or countless other long hikes traversing the US), the Hayduke Trail receives a comparitively miniscule amount of section hikers and only a small handful of through-hikers every year. The trail is named after fictional character George Washington Hayduke III, the rough-and-ready radical ecowarrior/ecoterrorist defender of the Southwest in Edward Abbey's novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang." Hayduke personified many of Abbey's longings to protect the wilderness of the American Southwest by any means necessary. The trail name is a fitting tribute to Edward Abbey's tireless advocation for the preservation of wilderness and strong opinions on how that wilderness should be enjoyed. The Hayduke Trail is precisely how Abbey would have wanted Americans to experience their public lands:
"In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."
The Hayduke Trail was first conceived by Joe Mitchell and Mike Coronella back in 1998. The first through-hike of the "trail" wasn't until 2005 by Brian Frankle. Unlike the Pacific Crest Trail or Appalachian Trail (or countless other long hikes traversing the US), the Hayduke Trail receives a comparitively miniscule amount of section hikers and only a small handful of through-hikers every year. The trail is named after fictional character George Washington Hayduke III, the rough-and-ready radical ecowarrior/ecoterrorist defender of the Southwest in Edward Abbey's novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang." Hayduke personified many of Abbey's longings to protect the wilderness of the American Southwest by any means necessary. The trail name is a fitting tribute to Edward Abbey's tireless advocation for the preservation of wilderness and strong opinions on how that wilderness should be enjoyed. The Hayduke Trail is precisely how Abbey would have wanted Americans to experience their public lands:
"In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."
-Edward Abbey
My longtime friend Ryan Weidert (trailname: Tuna Helper) and I began planning our Hayduke Trail through-hike well over two months in advance— permits, food, gear, water, route—there was much to plan. He was an experienced long distance through-hiker; I had never backpacked more than 8 days at a time. We both have a very strong fascination and love for the landscape of the Colorado Plateau; this, combined with the fact that we would seldom be following an actual trail, peaked my interest and convinced me that this could be the long-distance hike for me. We decided to embrace the choose-your-own-adventure mentality of the route, penciling in several shortcuts we wished to try, adding in stretches of packrafting and technical canyoning detours, passing on the large detour up to Bryce Canyon NP, creating our own route linking Hackberry/Buckskin/Paria/Vermillion/North Rim, and arranging for a 4WD pick-up at the end of the Grand Canyon to Parunuweap to ferry us across 40 miles of sandy open terrain. We often questioned why the route went "there" when it could have gone "here" (sometimes this was obvious when we got there, other times not). So we would certainly be taking some liberties with the idea of a Hayduke Trail through-trip. We planned to average 20+ mile days, and complete our hike in about 38 days.
We set off to begin placing our caches on the 10th of September 2013. We had hoped to coincide our hike with the tail end of the monsoon season (usually very reliably the beginning of September), which should give us enough of a window to get through the Grand Canyon just before it started to get wretchedly cold and wintery. This however turned out to be an extremely atypical year. The biggest storm of the season (some Utah locals told us the biggest in 30 years!), hit southern Utah just before we left. This complicated things considerably as many of the roads we wished to place caches along were horribly washed out (House Rock Road, Long Canyon Road, Cottonwood Rd, Hole-In-The-Rock Road) so we had to cache them in often much less ideal locations.
Because of these delays we did not began hiking until September 13, 2013. Though we were fortunate to have only one wet rainy night (the first night!), many nights we got very lucky with storms passing left and right of us. Rogue thunderstorms continued for two weeks often as thick afternoon accumulations. A couple storms produced impressive downpours and/or flash floods that forced us to run to shelter and wait out the storm (usually only about 30 minutes). We pushed to averaged 20-22 mile days, often requiring hiking an hour or two past dark. A few times these long day pushes were ill-conceived, but often they allowed for pleasant hiking in the cool night (beautiful moonlight at the beginning of our trip) and was a good opportunity to bash out "commuter miles" (dirt roads, etc. linking more stimulating parts of the trail). In hindsight, planning on 15-mile days is probably an ideal way to maximize enjoyment.
We set off to begin placing our caches on the 10th of September 2013. We had hoped to coincide our hike with the tail end of the monsoon season (usually very reliably the beginning of September), which should give us enough of a window to get through the Grand Canyon just before it started to get wretchedly cold and wintery. This however turned out to be an extremely atypical year. The biggest storm of the season (some Utah locals told us the biggest in 30 years!), hit southern Utah just before we left. This complicated things considerably as many of the roads we wished to place caches along were horribly washed out (House Rock Road, Long Canyon Road, Cottonwood Rd, Hole-In-The-Rock Road) so we had to cache them in often much less ideal locations.
Because of these delays we did not began hiking until September 13, 2013. Though we were fortunate to have only one wet rainy night (the first night!), many nights we got very lucky with storms passing left and right of us. Rogue thunderstorms continued for two weeks often as thick afternoon accumulations. A couple storms produced impressive downpours and/or flash floods that forced us to run to shelter and wait out the storm (usually only about 30 minutes). We pushed to averaged 20-22 mile days, often requiring hiking an hour or two past dark. A few times these long day pushes were ill-conceived, but often they allowed for pleasant hiking in the cool night (beautiful moonlight at the beginning of our trip) and was a good opportunity to bash out "commuter miles" (dirt roads, etc. linking more stimulating parts of the trail). In hindsight, planning on 15-mile days is probably an ideal way to maximize enjoyment.
The first half of the hike was going great...we weathered 21 days of long days, storms, flash floods, high winds, cold temperatures, quicksand, scorpions, cacti, packrats, thick vegetation, poison ivy, mosquitoes, tricky navigation, rivers, sketchy drop-offs, loose rocks, and all varieties of suspect terrain, only to arrive at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and be escorted out of the national park by rangers with tasers because of the US federal government shutdown beginning October 1st, 2013! Such an end was very disappointing, but disgusting more than anything. This was the most logistically intense stretch for us, and by far the part of the trip I was most looking forward to. Of all the factors involved in pulling this trip off, I never would have anticipated that we could not complete our Hayduke Trail through-hike—which required nothing from anyone else but the ability to traverse public lands protected for the American People—because of petty nearsighted politics. Hayduke would have continued hiking; we did not. Hopefully we will be given the opportunity to pick up where we left off sometime.
Webpage: https://www.ncbarth.com/Hayduke.htm
