Great Western Trail

On teh road to the Colorado River I got sidetracked by a town that was a tourist outpost for the Capitol Reef National Park. As a rule, I am avoiding the national parks because they basically don’t let dogs out of the car and they charge a fortune for entrance and camping. I will admit that they likely have the absolute best of all scenery, but having to make quick car stops and scenic drives has limited appeal. I think there is plenty to see outside the parks.

Anyways, this town also had the Great Western Trail running through it which crossed through National Forest land. It sounded interesting so I went for it. Drove the truck as far up an ATV trail as I could comfortably get it (not far at all) and headed out.

Here are some pics on the way to the town though (I am posting from a hotel on the other end of this trip).

This first pic gives you a taste of what South-central to south-east Utah looks like. Desert and painted rocks in sharp relief.

Dawn on the day of departure… before setting off on the formal trail I dayhiked up a nearby flattop.

Not actually this one… this one just made for a good pic.

Reminds me of those lion shots I am sure I’ve seen in a sunset red light. Only not so fierce. You will see a lot of Sadie shots here because frankly, the setting is just not as photogenic as the wetter, more verdant Colorado settings. So the dog is my cheap prop.

I love how the grasses catch the light.

Gonna have to send these pics to Toyota…

So the following pics are all from the close-by flattop. It was about 300 feet high I’d say which isn’t much but on most sides it was STRAIGHT up, which is something.

This picture somehow better captures the vertigo you feel of standing on the top of something really really high. That feeling is almost completely lost in pictures. This one seems just disorienting enough to give the impression and I think the stream below gives distance context. Still, seems flat. I look forward to figuring out how to pull distance off without 3d glasses.

Here we see the caves that the Pueblo peoples used for shelter.

Oh no! The giant rabies-vaccinated she-devil is attacking again! She’s all but wiped out the native peoples!

More giant Sadie pics for fun.

A different kind of monster.

There was a sign going into the forest land that said to be on the lookout for suspicious drug activity: farming tools, people that didn’t ‘belong’, etc. Well lookie, lookie..

I tried *hard* to find more evidence of illicit activity but failed.

Rising up, back on his feet..

The disembark pose.

There aren’t many pictures of this trip, but it was 3 days/ 2nights and treacherous, grueling walking with a 50lb+ pack. I was headed for something called 1,000 lake hilltop. So I assumed there would be water eventually but I also knew it was desert most or all of the way so I brought about a gallon and a half of water. The weather was good so I was light on clothes, but the total weight of the pack was still monstrous. Food like water is also a very heavy item.

The trip started off poorly with me taking a wrong turn early. I didn’t bother to find a trail map and was going on a rough memory of a map I had seen earlier and my GPS. So I had a nice 1.5 mile detour to start off with. I then had another 7 miles of incline walk before I realized that the main Western trail was not actually going to take me to the hilltop and that there was NO WATER anywhere else. Night was coming so I basically just stopped on the trail and walked off a bit hoping for a decent tent siting. I got one that was decently smooth but couldn’t find anything flat. So several times a night I basically had to get up and move back uphill inside the tent.

Here was a shot from pretty high up, not the top, but high up. The distances you could see were pretty insane but there was a blue ozone-like haze that keeps the pics from being super clear.

Dawn shots.

So in the morning I had to decide whether I was gonna turn around or keep looking for water, most likely on top of the 1,000 lake hill. I decided to cut over to the hill. This was straight off-trail hiking and turned out to be damned hard, particularly with the weight on my back. I was down to essentially no water at mid-day. I was climbing over precarious rubble fields and between tightly knit aspens and basically eating snow when I could find it. My assumption was that the lakes would provide the water or at worst-case, the higher elevation would produce even more snow.

Fortunately I had enough food, as I didn’t want to touch this.

Of particular difficulty was the very last 200 feet until the top of the hillside. When I had arrived there it was basically a straight up bluff. So I had to corkscrew south on the mountain and travel upwards when possible. This GPS image shows me finally arriving at the top. It basically tells the story.

The GPS was very frustrating on this trip. It highlighted two different roads which when I went out of my way to get to, turned out not to exist. Also, it really fails to show on the topo exactly how the land undulates on the way to (and from) the mountain. So, despite the fact that you are attempting to generally head upwards you end up getting stuck at local maxima and have to descend again, only to go up, and then down, etc. A waste of effort. This was particularly bad on the way back because the terrain undulations were precisely perpendicular to the direction I needed to go.

So, I finally arrived at the top of the 1,000 lake hilltop and there was not a SINGLE LAKE. So I had to revert to my snow strategy. The upshot of being in a desert was that the fire was very easy to start.

I must say that the inevitable pine and sage needles that find their way into the snow make for quite an interesting taste. I can’t wait to see what long-term consequences develop..

Dawn pic from on top. Hazy.

I had a good second night’s sleep with a perfectly flat surface. Even at 11,200 feet it wasn’t that cold. I am not that far from fish lake which was actually lower than that so I have to credit the sunny warm snap we are in. I had melted about a half gallon of snow over 2 hours of effort and stored it in my rubbermaid wal-mart cheapie 2 gallon I had brought. In the morning it was essentially all gone. I think a pine needle lodged in the lower valve and it trickled out. fantastic. Still I had drank as much as I could the night before so I was ok.

I was feeling ready and confident for the return trip. Despite my best effort I actually never made it back to the trail I had come up on. Obstacles kept making it the hardest way to go, so I basically back-countried it half way back until finding a completely different trail that took me the rest of the way. So this was another 10 miles or so, and I’d say the total trip was about 25. This underestimates the effort because of the tough terrain and over 4,000 foot elevation differential. Needless to say I was EXHAUSTED, and for the first time in the trip I stayed the night at a hotel. Still sore this afternoon.

Finally found water on the way back. This was nice.

One last shot of rocks…

Ok, a few days of easier travel are in store now…

I have a video log of day 2 of the trip I may post later.. will take some time to do.