Horseshoe Cyn & Mystic Hot Springs Nov 24

After a good night's sleep in Moab we drove early to Horseshoe Canyon, a BLM surrounded outlier of Canyonlands National Park undoubtedly incorporated for the significance of four flat sections of canyon wall that are the canvases for some of the best and most intricate pictographs on North America. The long dirt road drive into the outpost was surprisingly scenic with views of snowy dunes in front of mountain peaks, buttes, badlands, and some vast canyonland views. When we arrived there was one other couple at this remote trailhead, whom we soon passed.

The trail was really an ambitious old ranch/oil exploration era road carved in slickrock that we followed down. Partway down we easily spotted the well preserved dinosaur track right on the side of the trail.

The crazy road switchbacked into a precarious cliff edge before dropping down to a sand dune leading to the canyon floor. The wash of Horseshoe was mostly hard dried mud from recent floods and cobbles making for easy walking, cold in shadows and comfortable in sun. Very soon on our left we approached the left side shadows of High Panel. Just before we spotted two eerily tame rabbits, fully content to nibble on leaves while we watched them 4 feet away, even hopping closer to our feet!

High Panel was not the most impressive we would see but had many well laid out elongate figures in a band across the wall and we spent many minutes looking at the details from a distance before moving on. 

We crossed ice in the streambed and into the sun to arrive at the horseshoe Panel a few minutes later. This panel was more intricate than the first and featured several different painted pigments on animal and shield-like forms. We almost left to carry on but noticed a chain fence at the top of the rock pile which clued us into an trail we could take up to see some more out of sight pictographs. 

Onward we walked about 15 minutes through canyon bends to reach the Alcove Panel, deep in an undercut. Disappointingly this panel had the worst historic and modern graffiti defacing it. I found the artwork here particularly interesting in how the figures were chosen to be positioned on top of variations in the rock. The main panel had a red layer leading into a yellow one which some figures span and others seem to stand upon. A panel to the side had red rock-colored figures painted onto a light colored section of rock creating a negative relief/dark mode/white text on black sort of effect. Some of the devil-like figures were intricate in detail compared to the panels we had just seen. The spacious alcove seemed a nice place for the ancients to hide from sun and rain.

From the Alcove Panel it was a one mile stroll through the sunny and shadowed meanders of the canyon to the Great Gallery at the end of our out-and-back walk. The Great Gallery was truly breathtaking and without comparison. It was as if the other panels were the graffiti on the walls of the museum and we just entered the main hall of the masters. The feeling was of viewing an open air Sistine Chapel. The mastery and significance could easily be felt even if it was not fully understood. My photos certainly do not do it justice. Over a hundred figures span a 200+ foot length of rock canvas. Thankfully the park provided a pair of binoculars with which to see the intricacies painted into many of the figures, revealing detail akin to fingerprints in their complexity and organization. Without effort we spent an hour both sitting and pacing in front of the art, periodically finding some new detail revealing itself to us. The nutshell version is of many uniquely patterned, dignified, armless, square-shouldered, elongate spirit figures looming over smaller action posed humans and animals. Some of the spirits contain animals and smaller spirits within them and at least one appears to be birthing a small spirit (top left of frontispiece). The prominent "holy ghost" figure is said to have its head turned in 3/4 perspective as if looking at a viewer centered on the middle of the panel.

We left the gallery a little while after the other couple arrived and past a couple other groups on our way back down canyon and up the road. We made it back to the car without incident, the temperature

Leaving Horseshoe we drove back across the desert, dunes, and occasional badlands back to pavement and headed west on Highway 70. Almost immediately we recognized the unreliability of our weird hybrid rental car as the "miles to empty" dropped considerably faster than the miles travelled finding us to be well short of the nearest gas station. We considered detour options but I thought our best bet would be sticking to the interstate on Thanksgiving. I drove ridiculously efficiently as semitrucks passed and we contemplated the unpleasantness of breaking down in the snowy mountain pass shadows. Tensions were high. About 30 miles past empty we pulled into Salina for gas, a huge weight unburdening us.

Shortly on we arrived at our destination of Mystic Hot Springs. Mystic was both the same as always and a completely different experience. The facilities and infrastructure were unchanged from my last visit a decade ago (and indeed probably unchanged from the 70s) but in response to COVID and the InstaWorld you now had to pay/check-in online, sign liability releases, and could only visit the hot springs with 2 hour reservation slots. Oh well. We settled into our cozy bus Athea, ate, and eventually set out for our scheduled evening soak. We started out in the furthest bathtub where I got distracted by night photography for a solid half hour before eventually embracing the warmth of the water. The tub struggled to get too much hotter than lukewarm with the cold night sapping heat. After about an hour I noticed the guy in the neighboring tub moved on and through great difficulty managed to convince Heather to move 20 feet to that tub. Much better temperature! This was surely the best and warmest pool on this night and we settled in for much more comfort. 

We started out in the farthest bathtub where I got distracted by night photography for a solid half hour before eventually embracing the warmth of the water. The tub struggled to get much warmer than lukewarm with the cold night sapping heat. After about an hour I noticed the guy in the neighboring tub moved on and through great difficulty I managed to convince Heather to move 20 feet to that tub. Much better temperature! This was surely the best and warmest pool on this night and I abandoned my idea of tub crawling back down the hill. We enjoyed this tub the rest of the night.

The small space heater in our bus worked hard to keep us cozy all night and after a leisurely morning we set off. We stopped at Denny's in Beaver and took a detour to drive through the Kolob Canyons part of Zion. The rest of our drive home was uneventful if long. It was not at all the trip we thought it would be (a recurring theme it seems) but I am thankful for what we did manage to see.

Needles District Nov 23

More plans squandered and then improvised. Plan A was a 24 mile overnight grand tour through the heart of Canyonland's Needles District taking in Druid Arch, Chesler Park, Joint Trail, the Grabens, and The Confluence. Plan B was instead a long 13.5 mile day trip cutting the Grabens and The Confluence from the itinerary. From Monticello we drove down the spacious valleys of Indian Creek and then onto the dirt road to the Elephant Hill Trailhead. The trail started out as interesting as I remembered as it traversed slickrock and cryptobiotic benches with views of otherworldly jointed formations and snowy peaks on distant horizons. The cool morning encouraged quick travel. At Elephant Canyon we branched off the trail to Chesler Park, instead following the wash upstream towards Druid Arch. The travel was more scenic and varied than I expected and included a section with slickrock bowls and a short bolted ladder. The last gully led us up to a bench with fantastic views of Druid Arch (frontispiece) and a great view back down the valley. 

Almost halfway back down Elephant Canyon we missed the subtle cut-off trail to Chesler Park and so ended up taking a more direct route involving climbing through a couple cliff bands to gain the trail. This trail was also quite neat as it intricately weaved through a gully, bypassed dryfalls, and traversed hanging slickrock benches before a final slickrock bowl leading to a saddle into Chesler Park. 

Chesler Park was as great as I remembered with horizon spanning views of the needles and a long expanse of mountains beyond mountains towards the Colorado River and beyond. We dropped into the floor of the park and detoured to check out the CP4 campsite we would have stayed at in Plan A. It was absolutely stunning with solitude and a view few campsites can match anywhere. We also detoured to check out an interesting saddle looking southward and then onto the Joint Trail. 

The Joint Trail is remarkable and I am jealous of whoever first traversed it, perhaps thousands of years ago. It follows a narrow shoulder width joint gap down a long corridor, and then turns down another cavernous joint before emerging into a wash south of Chesler Park.

We returned back along the Joint Trail and then spent about an hour offtrail traversing around jointed gaps and thick crypto mats to close a loop round Chesler Park. 

Back on the trail we made good time through long shadows back to the car. It was great to see a little more of the needles are but it is a place of intricacy like JTree's Wonderland of Rocks that is well worth more detailed exploration.

We drove on to a very busy day-before-Thanksgiving Moab, had dinner at the brewery, and stayed at the hotel across the way. The heated pool and jacuzzi won out the end of a great day.

Comb Ridge Nov 22

Oof what a rough night for me. The low was probably about 15F. My 20ish year old 0F bag is decidedly not a zero degree bag anymore, which was a tough lesson to learn. Despite a liner, thick thermal tops and bottoms, beanie, gloves, and strategically shoving my two down jackets I was still struggling to find enough warmth to sleep for more than a half hour at a time. So I woke up feeling fairly defeated and vulnerable to set out on a two day river trip that could be non-stop freezing. As we and our water slowly thawed in the sun we walked over to recheck out the Sand Island petroglyphs in daytime, a neat and strange assortment of many designs and styles through the ages right up to cowboy and modern graffiti carved into the desert varnish. It reminded me a bit of a modern graffiti wall with taggers competing for real estate and attention.

 

After breakfast in a warm car we drove the couple minutes to the San Juan River boat launch at the other end of the campground. My eyes deceived me at first as at first glance I thought I saw strange foam rafting down the river. After a few seconds of mental processing I realized it was ice! Lots of ice! Yikes! I think that was about all I had to see (as well as the short days and fact that we had not yet set a shuttle) to convince me that we should perhaps check out this section of the river in different circumstances. It could be OK but it could also be a miserable two days.

Too much ice!

Rolling with the punches, indecisiveness, and improvising yet again, we decided to do a leisurely hike to check out some nearby Comb Ridge ruins, retreat to a motel in Monticello, then rally for a nice Needles hike the next day. We hiked into the cold monocline gully turned canyon to Monarch Cave Ruins, which I had not been to before. The tidily built ruins sit in a spacious alcove adjacent to a dryfalls with a plunge pool below. Nice enough ruins, apparently now with enough visitation that you could only see it beyond ropes with a quite wide berth, which certainly reduced appeal. 

We returned back down the canyon and traversed slickrock in and out of several canyons headed for Eagle's Nest Ruin which I had been to before. On the way we found a random slope sprinkled with various types of ancestral Puebloan pottery sherds including coiled, corrugated coiled, and smoothed painted styles which was neat to stumble upon. 

We walked up the sloping slickrock ramp to the remarkably difficult to access Eagle's Nest Ruin. With its difficult access it is easily the least visited ruin in the area and probably relatedly one of the best preserved. Years and years ago I tried to access the ruin with a friend but decided it was too sketchy. This time: yes every bit as sketchy as I remember it! The ruin sits in an alcove just below the top of a 300ft tall cliff requiring a 20 ft full exposure traverse on thin and worn moki holds. Once again I opted to photograph it from before the traverse.

After Eagle's Nest we hiked a short distance north to a view of one more ruin cleanly embedded into a canyon's alcove, and then walked back from the car. This time we opted to fight our way down the overgrown wash rather than in and out of the canyons cutting slickrock- it was about the same amount of effort probably. We had to navigate through some bizarre alluvial karst but eventually made it. 

We opted to continue driving north along Comb Ridge to SH 95 instead of looping around to pavement which made a pleasantly scenic drive. We stopped to see a couple dinosaur tracks and then on to Monticello for warmth and pizza.