Escalante 2006 - A Dream and the Realities - Part Six

Yup....still...
Day 3
Monday July 24 7:00pm MDT

Damn Andy! This day never seemed to end, so full of promise and ultimately disappointment. Miraculously perhaps we kept in pretty good spirits. Dinner amounted to a tiny fraction of our now seemingly irrational stash of goods, a stash that included something like 60 bagels. Dinner was the first use of my new Jet Boil camp stove, used to boil water for some Kathmandu Curry, which even TClog ate. The Jet Boil kicks ass, hands down, boiling water faster than a microwave, and nesting compactly within itself for packing. I'm not sure what else we ate, probably a bagel and some gorp/granola bars/snacks that we were all carrying. Once that was done and Dan had cleaned the dishes (I was camp cook - meal planning having been my principal contribution prior to the trip, other than getting my ass to MN) we settled down in the sand for a relaxing evening. TClog had brought along a Crazy Creek camp chair (another nickname he automatically adopted), I was laying on my trail pad and Dan was just hunkjered down in the sand. We all had water ready to go for tomorrow and were just waiting out the end of the day, which ended shortly after nine.

Dan headed into the tent first, followed by TCLog shortly thereafter, and finally me, dreading the 'weather' that I was expecting to find in a tent built for three. Those fears were made real, plus I was too polite to force my trail pad into the tent after the others were asleep so I hoped that the soft sand and my sleeping bag would provide enough cushion. Tclog was in the middle, taking up as much room as he could on his palatial thermarest. Dan was on the left and I was on the right (Dan's tent thankfully has two doors) and we both basically found we were jammed up against slope of the tent trying to make no contact at all with the furnace between us. Anyone that believes that deserts get cool at night can kiss my ass. It never got cool in the gulch, at least not that night. Like most nights slept in a tent it was not even remotely satisfying. Dan says TClog and I are bad snorers, something that he apparently doesn't deal with in his normal sleeping arrangement. I have no memory of TClog snoring, though I don't doubt he did. As for me, I snore some, though not every night (at home), but the conditions of the tent apparently had a bad affect on me.

Tossing and turning with some regularity, but ultimately sleeping well enough to wake up after 7:00am (later than we had hoped) we all stayed in the tent through the whole night to avoid the threat of snakes and scorpions that we had read about. We are defintely people who play by the rules at the beginning of the game. Breakfast was some dehydrated granola with milk and probably a bagel, though bagels figure like sand and heat through this trip, they are everywhere and nowhere at once. Water prepared, camp cleaned up and stored for our absence we headed off down river, wearing sandals and carrying only daypacks - mostly for water and snacks.

Dan and I had been this way the previous day, but now we were doing it with some perspective and not in a sort of desperation. The morning was cool (not that cool, desert cooling believers) and we spent a bunch of time splashing through the stream. We also kept track of where we were on the map. Around every turn was a new and glorious vista (and for a long while Dan's footprints) and every turn was folllowed on the map. As we should have guessed, even travelling light we didn't make particularly fast progress. We eventually made it to the wash coming in from the north, about a third of the way to the arch, having found a lovely little camping spot on the south bank of the river, a spot that was to mark the point where Dan lost track of his prescription sunglasses. Further down the stream we even made it the vaunted Hurricane Wash. It joined the main water course somewhat subtly from the west, but it was unmistakable and another third of the way to the arch.

What we saw around us were phenomenally dramatic rock forms, the river having carved it's way through the rock, bending and winding, creating deep cavernous curves where the rock arches back over your head hundreds of feet, hundreds more feet in the air. To say it was amazing is a wild understatement. Amazing should be reserved for mundane wonders. This was truly majestic. This is why you come to this place, and these wonders weren't even the arches that are the principal landmarks on the route. These were just 'on the way' nameless geological features building your anticipation for the big event. Sort of like The Police opening for U2, at least in the minds of some.

Time was still pressing on and we were making fine time, fine in the sense that were getting the most out of our journey, not so fine if we had hopes of making it much beyond our original desired campsite by our agreed upon turn-around time (basically lunch). But we had resolved ourselves to the fact that we simply were not capable of living up to the expectations of the itineraries those that came before us left. It was either the summer heat or our pathetic lack of toughness. We saw it as the former. Plus, like all these adventures it seems like many who go on adventures do it for the destination, and we were on a journey, and loving most every minute of it.

The landscape continued its dramatic ascent around us, each mile dropping us deeper into the gulch and finally around another of the river's many bends it was there, the arch. Jacob Hamblin Arch specifically. And it was fucking dramatic. The river took a long sharp bend to the right, doing it's best to avoid the arch altogether. The arch launched out of the north bank of the river and forced the river as far south as it could before crashing into the floor of the canyon. The river, having held out longer than the arch, turned back hard to the left as if taunting the sandstone for having given itself up in such dramatic fashion. The river knows that relentless perserverance wins every time (just ask the juggernaut) and it laughed at the arch as it went by, turning right again and heading off towards the Escalante River, some 7 more miles distant.

This was where we had planned to camp, and it would have been a cool ass place. Not only was the scenery unbelievable, but it had a few extra features, namely pit toilets and the spring. Ahh the spring. Having spent the last 24 hours drinking increasingly hot, and eventually hot, iodine treated (though neutralized) water out of HOT plastic water containers, nothing could have been as sweet as the cool, clear, flavorless water of that spring. (Listen to me, 24 hours into the wilderness already complaining about the hot water - I'd actually endured far more hot plastic water travelling in India, but we all get soft in our old age, and this water was SWEET!) So we shot some pics of the arch and settled into one of the campsites just past the arch (in the shade - it was past noon) for some lunch. More melty cheese and yup, bagels, along with the inevitable gorp. And water, sweet sweet water. We had drunk most of our hot iodine water on the way down and so now began taking turns filling up (and consuming) the sweet sweet water from the spring.

Lunch was had, water bottles were filled, the spring was celebrated in many fashions before we began the journey back to camp, having gotten as far in 7 hours of hiking (mostly with daypacks) as we were told we could do in 3 (with fullpacks). Little ranger fucker.

More coming soon.....














(Dan is visible in the second picture, between the vegetation, though he is tiny - relative to the arch anyway)