The 13 hour day and extra night coming out from Choprock set us up for a leisurely "adventure hangover" day working our way down Hole In The Rock Road for our next big day trip. This was probably for the best as this was the most active day for thunderstorms and the area around Egypt seemed to have been reamed by some large cells. We started by checking out some interesting dinosaur trackways at Twentymile Wash while dark skies approached ominously. The tracks were preserved in the top of an Entrada Sandstone layer, making for a much different style of track than the mud imprints I more often see. It took us a while to clue into what to look for but once we did we saw about a hundred footprints, most as giant dinner plate-sized patches of complexly disturbed sediment.
We continued on for a long layover at the Dance Hall Rock parking lot, a perfect opportunity to dry all our gear while we ate lunch and flew drones. Initially I was satisfied flying my drone over the convoluted slickrock behind Dance Hall (including inescapable standalone potholes with cottonwood trees growing in them), but then I got jealous of Ryan flying over some neat terrain further away on the flanks of Fiftymile Mountain. Our midday entertainment was about to begin.
I pulled my drone back out and sent it off about a mile and a half towards Fiftymile. Almost immediately the wall of wind hit us from the storm approaching from the north and I had severe trouble controlling my drone. Not only was the drone being tossed around and I could not get it to outpace its strong headwind, but there was also other bizarre communication behavior, best I can guess weird electrical interference from the storm. It was a highly stressful 20 minutes as I would lose signal, attempt to return it home, regain signal briefly to allow me to gain a few hundred feet of progress towards home, then lose signal all over again. It was looking grim and my chill day turned to drama. The wind got worse and so did the interference. I managed to get it above an old two track road to at least serve as a landmark and tried to ease it back along. I lost connection as the battery level was becoming critical so Ryan and I set off down the road to the nearest point where there might be a hope of a connection. Ultimately I had to accept it likely crash landed, and we walked down the two-track about a half-mile to start searching from its last connection point. This could have been an epic or unsuccessful scavenger hunt but miraculously the drone was right at the last GPS point I lost connection, and was sitting upright on sand between some sage bushes, remarkably undamaged. All in all the best possible outcome but still alarming to have my first major connection loss event with mysterious circumstances.
Drone recovered, we drove on down the final 20 miles of Hole In The Rock Road, now significantly rougher and less traveled. Down here we saw no one apart from a large group of hunters and a couple lone campers. Some of the sandstone monoliths we passed were reminiscent of Uluru. The road occasionally scraped its way across some unimproved slickrock that had us questioning where the road was going. We saw some nice hoodoos and alcoves. Eventually we reached the remote end of the road at the Hole In The Rock, a crazy but over-celebrated crease in the otherwise unbroken cliffs that Mormon pioneers toiled to lower their covered wagons 800 feet vertically down to the Colorado River. The cliff edges seemed much more appealing than the steep down and back hike to the shore of Lake Powell so we set off across the north side until I reached a suitably panoramic view. Ironically despite the isolation the cell reception here was better than anywhere because the direct line of sight to the dark mound of Navajo Mountain looming to the south.
We took our time enjoying the view and catching up a bit on our lives back home, then strolled back to the car. Having seen the entire road we both agreed the roadside slickrock a mere 1400 feet from tomorrow's trailhead was the best spot around. Ryan carefully positioned the truck for a level night's sleep in the bed, then we took our dinner and margaritas up the nearby knoll to watch the sun fade on Fiftymile Mountain, Navajo Mountain, and the slickrock ocean of fossilized Jurassic sand dunes stretching out for miles. It was a stellar end to the day.
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