Birthday Trip 2023: Day Six
Monday, June 5th, 2023: 2023 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
After the fiasco on the canyon rim, Day Five’s second and final campsite started out warm at sundown, but the temperature plunged throughout the night, so that I had to keep getting up and adding clothes. The one positive was my vision – I’d had bad double vision the previous night, but now I could focus well on both moon and stars. Presumably these constant changes are due to the cataracts.
It was still dark when I woke up freezing in my warm-weather bag, and turning my head eastward saw the faint light of approaching dawn. I knew I couldn’t sleep anymore, so I waited, huddled in the fetal position to conserve body heat, until the sun hit the bluffs to my west.
Then I got up, went to the vehicle and dug out the remainder of my winter clothes. All bundled up with thermal cap, hood, and gloves, I estimated it was well below 40 here at the end of May, at about 5,600 feet elevation. The sun soon reached my campsite, where I made coffee, had breakfast, and began shedding clothes.
I put on my boots and started to pack up for the drive back to the canyon rim, but immediately felt a sharp pain above the outside of my right ankle, so bad I could barely walk and had to remove the boots. These boots have extra ankle support, and I rarely but occasionally get these ankle pains that seem to represent some kind of pressure point. I normally address it with a felt pad over the ankle while hiking, and the pain disappears completely when I put on regular shoes that don’t contact the sensitive area. But this pain was higher up than usual – on the tendon that runs upward from the ankle on the outside of the calf. I wouldn’t be able to hike at all with this kind of pain!
But I changed into sneakers and drove back to the rim, hoping to find a solution once I got there.
At the rim, I first tried adding a felt pad, but that didn’t help at all. Then I tried lacing the boot a couple hooks lower, but that made little difference. So I dug out my Ace bandage. wrapped that around my lower calf, shouldered my pack and started down the trail, but I only made it a hundred yards before having to turn back.
Could I hike in sneakers? Many people do, but the chronic inflammation in my left foot requires extra support. Still, I figured it was worth a try – my sneakers are “stability shoes” with supportive soles, and they have custom orthotics like my hiking boots. I limped back up to the vehicle and switched to the sneakers. But in sneakers, carrying my heavy pack with four liters of water, I only made it a few yards down the steep trail before I realized this wouldn’t work.
I had one last chance. I’d brought my waterproof winter boots in case I had to ford streams, and they have more padding and more hooks for fine-tuning the lacing. When laced all the way up, they caused the same pain, but when I laced the right one as low as possible, so the area around the ankle was free, the pain was much reduced. It still hurt, but I was damned if I would give up.
The trail follows an old road down a steep white clay slope into a network of gullies, which eventually lead to a red clay ledge, where the road ends at an old campsite on a point overlooking the canyon. This whole area is federally designated wilderness, so I’d finally reached a place where no vehicles could bother me!
From the point, you have to find your way down a very steep series of bare rock faces and narrow ledges, sometimes marked by the tracks of many other recent hikers, sometimes marked only by cairns. In places there are several parallel routes, but they all eventually converge. The rocks along the way are fantastic!
Finally I reached the canyon bottom, where the rim trail joins the canyon trail and the surface turns to soft powder sand. I’d seen from above that the canyon was flooded upstream, and now I found out why – a beaver dam!
My ankle pain had completely disappeared, and never returned! It’s got to be a nerve-related pressure point responding to contact with the ankle support built into the boot. It’s a real drag, because these boots are otherwise perfect for me.
The flowers were spectacular down here. I’d brought topo maps for the whole canyon, showing that it looped repeatedly back and forth like a snake for about ten miles northward to the river. Plus I’d brought a much less detailed map printed off the Web, showing roughly where the petroglyphs could be found, with directions. The petroglyph map and directions weren’t very detailed – which of course helps deter vandals – so I missed the first panel completely and overshot by a few hundred yards, crossing the stream a couple of times, before realizing I must’ve missed it.
Returning to the first stream crossing, I still couldn’t seen the petroglyphs from the trail, but noticed a patinated face a hundred and fifty feet above that looked promising, so I began climbing, and was eventually able to make them out.
The online directions said this canyon deserves to be better known for its rock art, which is why I was here in the first place. And this series of panels turned out to be very large and complex. The only problem was weathering – most of the images had become so faint they were hard to see and almost impossible to photograph, especially in the bright light of midday.
One of my readers surprised me by erroneously assuming I haven’t been enhancing these images to make them more readable. I actually do enhance all my petroglyph and pictograph images, but primarily to make them look the way I actually saw them, since I’m almost never able to photograph them in good light, and I’m not proficient enough with cameras to adjust exposure on the spot.
So the images often end up overexposed. Fortunately I’m much more experienced with Photoshop than I am with a camera, so I add contrast and/or saturation afterward as needed to make the photos look the way I saw them. I hate the digital effects used by some rock art photographers to enhance the readability of the images; I only want them to look the way I saw them, in their natural setting.
After leaving the first site I recrossed the creek, working my way around the next bend on a much-trodden trail. But when I approached the third bend and the trail began climbing, I realized that most hikers are using this canyon to access the backpacking trail to the high point of the Swell, about six miles east. The route down the canyon is less used, so there’s no single trail, just a variety of lesser-used routes through dense vegetation that often disappear or become a dead end at a cliff edge.
The next petroglyph panel was supposed to be on the north side of a “rincon”. I’d heard the word but not its meaning; when I came to a huge cove west of the stream with a prominent stone butte in the middle of it, I assumed the butte was the rincon. Getting there wasn’t easy; the stream entered a narrow, sheer-sided stone gap where it was too deep to ford. I had to find a ford upstream, then climb steep banks of loose rubble and sandstone ledges high above the stream to get around the gap. That brought me to the north side of the butte, and a slope which was covered with biological soil crust. I carefully meandered across it on old cattle trails, finding no rock faces suitable for petroglyphs.
Re-checking the directions, I discovered I was supposed to be working my way up a “plain”. I immediately saw the plain below on my right, and when I made my way down there, noticed a small patinated surface at the base of the 300-foot-tall red sandstone cliff.
This had a single panel, featuring bison and a horned figure on horseback, but the left side had exfoliated. Another check of my notes showed that this was that last panel in the canyon, but further back in the big cove I saw cliffs that looked promising and decided to explore that way. I later learned that “rincon” means hidden valley – the whole cove was the rincon.
I did find two sheep petroglyphs back there which the author of the web page had missed. Finally I was discovering something new by myself! But that was it for today – I figured I’d only gone about three miles but it was already mid-afternoon. I didn’t want to spend another night in this area, and to keep my options open I needed to head back to the vehicle now.
Since the directions to the second site had started from the creek below the narrow gap, I went straight down the plain to the creek, and crossed there on steppingstones. I found a trail up the opposite bank, which led to the ledge high above the gap across from where I’d climbed earlier. But the trail ended there at the edge of a cliff. The tracks showed lots of hikers had come up to this dead end – I was the latest.
I had to work my way back down, back across the creek, and through dense, trackless riparian vegetation to get up the opposite ledge and down the other side. The rest was straightforward, just returning the way I’d come.
I’d been dreading the climb out of the canyon, up those tilted ledges of white sandstone under full sun, but that turned out to be the best part of the hike.
I had to drive to the highway the same way I’d come in, so I waited until then to decide where to go next. I was due in California, at the big lake on the Colorado River, in two days. That would be 7-1/2 hours from here by the interstate through Las Vegas, which was the last way I wanted to go. Since I had two days to get there I decided to drive north an hour tonight, to a small town I was familiar with that had a cheap but comfortable motel. The town had little in the way of restaurants but I had plenty to eat in my room.
Next: Days Seven Through Eleven