Escalante 2006 - A Dream and the Realities - Part Five

Not sure I really planned for this to be a ten part (?) series, but somehow I consistently find just about the same stamina to write every time and all the entries have been about the same length. Funny that it may be more entries than actual days of adventure. Oh well...

Still....
Day 3
Monday July 24 about 1:30MDT
The gulch continues to narrow as the amount of water in the river bed increases from just a ghost of waters past to actual water. Vegetation increases as well, offering us both greater shade and a more difficult time following the trail. Damn it never dawned on me that following a trail marked by a river and enclosed on both sides by sheer cliffs would be so difficult, but there you have it. The gulch is wider than expected and the trail ranges from side to side, crossing and recrossing the river as it makes it way down stream.

TClog is hurting, for various reasons. His pack is very uncomfortable, though at the time it seems like it's just him not being used to carrying one, and his broken thermostat is not making his life easier in the 100 degree heat. We stop alot so he can rest and cool off, along with getting the pack off of his back. Dan and I are doing as well as can be expected given the conditions are our own lack of 50+ pound pack experience of late. Nobody is really prepared for this, but our friend TClog is certainly in a different class of unprepared. Dan offers to 'share the load' with TClog, taking some of his stuff so he can travel lighter. What we should have done in retrospect is repack his pack, but who knew that a pack could be packed so damn badly? Now I know. Another likely strike against the scouts in our midst, added to their asbestos-like gift with fires is now their inability to properly pack a pack.

Even with the stops it still seems like when we're moving we're making decent time, but again in retrospect we must have been fucking CRAWLING along. We really didn't have many periods of being confused in the first couple hours of the trail, but all those rest breaks were really adding up. TClog was out on a 'blistering' pace between breaks, a pace that earned him the new nickname "beeline". What wasn't apparent right away was that this was his way of getting this damn hike over with as soon as possible. Even with his 'fast' pace between stops, we would learn that our pace was not fast at all.

The scenery continued to be beautiful and got more dramatic with every mile. The cliffs rose on either side and the vegetation became denser and more lush. The contrast of the red sandstone cliff and the green vegetation was striking, causing me to shoot a lot of pictures that seemed great at the time, but in the end almost all look alike. Good pictures, but sheesh. I'm not sure old TClog was really getting the most from the scenery given his discomfort but we did manage to get some of his naturalist knowledge out of him from time to time. His summers at Philmont were often the starting or ending point of his declarations, and despite the inherent humor in that, his knowledge of the local flora and fauna was pretty good.

The most vexing moment of the hike in came at a point where the river does some funky things that aren't really clear on the 24 minute map we had. If this were basketball I'd say it did a crossover dribble, and the net effect was that it schooled us for an easy hoop. The river swings slowly to the right consistent with what has been it's regular back and forth, but then swings abruptly left down through a sort of stone (must have been some harder rock or else it would have been worn away like everything else) chute/waterfall that a backpacker could not follow. The land around it went high with lots of possible paths, though none of them well marked, and we couldn't easily find the primary trail. We crossed the river before it banked left and climbed over a sort of sand dune and back down into a heavily vegetated area that turned out to be a dead end. Another good time to rest while we figured out what to do next, but TClog was really running out of gas, though that wasn't entirely apparent to me at the time.

Dan and I did some reconoitering as to the best path, one I'm not sure we found based on our return journey through this area. It went high on the left side of the river with our hope being that it would drop back down into the gulch and resume its more normal path. At this point we had no idea where we were on the map and it wasn't possible to distinguish this particular geographical feature on the map. All of the trails that we followed may well have been cattle or animal trails, and their itineraries may not match ours. Ultimately you'd have to really screw up to leave the gulch, but still, it was mighty disconcerting to not know how far we'd come and what time lay ahead. At this point we still held out hope (Dan and I anyway) that we'd reach our original destination in a short time and all the confusion of the day would be worth it.

Having decided on our path, we reapplied sunscreen (magical stuff that kept all of us burn free despite the harsh conditions) and climbed up and out of our jungle-like dead end. This was a bit excruciating given the loads and may have been the last straw for TClog. I would guess that we had a 100 to 150 elevation gain to get around the river's hijinx before it levelled out and eventually we dropped back down into the gulch. Regardless, he soldiered on, more quiet all the time and we eventually got back to a spot that made us more comfortable about the path, though we still had no actual idea where we were. There were a couple obvious features that we expected to come across, the principal one being Hurricane Wash, another trail and also a tributary to the river we were following. Hurricane Wash comes in from the south about a mile before our desired campsite and so around every turn we hoped to see some large gulch heading back to the southwest and a second water source. It was not to be however. Not today anyway.

We continued on for maybe (?) another half mile before crossing the river onto a rather large sand bank that hugged the river's left bank. TClog crashed in the shade and I presumed we would take a decent rest here before moving on. I learned rather quickly that TClog's condition was much worse than imagined. He was fried. He probably bonked, and even getting him to respond was difficult (though I attribute this to his personality rather than any physiological effect of his condition). Dan and I had some water and some lunch - bagels and some really melty cheddar and tomato. TClog had some too, though he wasn't eating with any sort of zeal. I was the only one that seemed to have a significant appetite, though Dan ate a decent amount. I began the slow effort of getting TClog to eat something to replace both the calories he had expended and the electrolytes he had lost. The man need salt, among other things. Thankfully he'd been drinking water at a good clip, he just had sweated out most of the salt in his body.

A decision was made that Dan would head off with a daypack (one that I thought had water in it) and I would stay back and try to nurse TClog back to health. Dan, as it turned out, only took EMPTY water bottles with him, believing he would find the spring near our original campsite goal and bring water back for all of us. He would be travelling light (though not hunting orc) equipped with trekking poles and a can-do spirit. Once he was off it remained for me to cajole TClog into eating some of the vacuum packed chicken he'd brought to make up for eating with the vegetarians. I'd hoped it contained the high amount of salt that such things normally do, although this turned out to be not really true. Nonetheless, he made his way through it, continuing to drink water and seeming to improve slowly but surely.

At some point after Dan's departure I laid down and while talking to TClog dozed off. Fitful, but after 30 hours of travelling and a 3+ hours of bacpacking my body demanded a rest. I woke up beginning to worry about Dan's whereabouts, he having been gone for more than an hour. TClog talked about his role as curriculum developer for the district and me sort of fading in and out of consciousness. Eventually we heard Dan yelling our names, and replied back, though I doubt he made out the specifics of what we said. Within a short period of time he was back, having been gone for an hour and a half or so, now thoroughly tired and very, very thirsty. He'd taken no water, as you'll remember, and had all manner of adventures on the way, at one point finding himself almost up to the knees in quicksand. Quicksand was pretty common along the river, though it was never deeper than what Dan experienced on his solo outing.

Dan was dejected. He hadn't found any of the major landmarks he had hoped, and certainly never made it to the spring. We decided that our only real option was to camp where we were and regroup for tomorrow. Dan drank some water, we collected some water to treat with iodine and Cory continued to feel better. After getting that stuff done, I decided to take the map and the compass downstream a bit to try to figure out where we were. The map was pretty descriptive, but we hadn't followed it very closely so far thinking it would be easy to find our way, and under the assumption that it was a three hour hike to the campsite. We'd already hiked more than three hours, and Dan had hiked nearly another hour with no pack at all, and we still hadn't seen evidence of our goal. So, if for no other purpose than to determine our location I headed off, shod in sandals and carrying only the map, a compass and my camera. The time was about 4:30pm.

My walk down river was pretty uneventful. I saw lots of evidence of Dan, both coming and going, but I generally walked in the actual river when possible, knowing that was the only sure way to not get lost. It was evening, so the light was quite beautiful on the sandstone. I took lots of pictures on the way but was more focused on determining our location. It only took a couple bends in the river for me to have a good inkling where we were, but I kept heading down river hoping to get to the last big wash that comes in from the north. As I went I made guesses as to what the river would do to prove to myself that I knew where I was. Eventually I started to get a bit anxious about the time and without getting to the wash (but still seeing Dan's footprints who had clearly gone farther) I turned around and headed back, returning to camp about 50 minutes after I left.

Dan and TClog had set up the tent (Dan presumably) and TClog had formulated a plan for the following day. I had a plan too, though it was more ambitious and involved us moving our camp to the original goal, hiking as early in the morning as possible with heavy loads. TClog and Dan had come to the conclusion that we should leave our camp here and hike as far as we could the next day, to the arch and spring and beyond, whatever time allowed. I was cool with that, so we settled in for the evening and prepared to eat some dinner.

All told, we had travelled perhaps 3 of the 7 miles we had planned, in about the same time as we expected to do the entire distance. What the hell? Were we that out of shape? Was the ranger dicking us around? Does 100 degree heat really have that great an impact? All the accounts we'd read involved doing exactly what we originally planned, namely seven miles in to the campsite the first day. Seven mole dayhike and back (14 miles total) to the actual Escalante River and Steven's Arch, and that back out the third day. They, of course, all hiked in the spring or fall. We had accomplished less than half of our original goal so far, with only the dimmest hope of getting anywhere near Steven's Arch. But it was July.

More coming soon.....