The One Where We Howled at the Moon

Two weekends ago Justin and I went backpacking in Coyote Gulch with his friend Cory and Cory's fiance Liz.  It is seriously one of the most beautiful places on earth!!  Cory used to work in the Escalante National Monument collecting bees (how random!!) but never did this particular hike.  He and Justin have been talking about doing it since 2008 and Cory is moving soon so we finally went.  I was excited to try out my new backpack that Justin gave me for my birthday.

The trip started out like many of our camping trips.  Justin and I were running late so by the time we got to Cory's house it was mid-afternoon and I hadn't eaten lunch.  So we started out driving through a McDonalds.  About an hour down the highway we ran into some road construction, not surprising in the summer, and even less surprising, there was no one actually doing construction!!  Why do they leave those stinkin' cones up and cut a three lane road down to one for no reason other than to slow down travelers?!!  Good grief!  Apparently the lack of movement gave Justin time to ponder on things we may have accidentally left behind when he remembered we actually did leave two very important items at home- our sleeping pads!!  (Funny enough, we've done this once before on our trip to Yellowstone last summer) So we made another stop along the way at Wal-Mart to pick up some $5 foam pads.  These are the times you're grateful for Wal-Mart's cheap prices and omnipresence :)

With all of these sidetrips we were much later getting into Escalante than originally planned and the sun was setting.  And where we had planned to camp for the night was 40 miles down a dirt road.  Again, true to form,  we were about 15 miles down the washboards when Cory realized we were almost out of gas.  So we had to trek back to town, fill up, and hunt down a place to camp.  By now it was pitch dark and there sure aren't a lot of street lights in the monument.  We basically camped in the middle of a dirt road.  I love our adventures!!  Luckily, nobody else seemed interested in driving down this road so we didn't have to wake up and move.  Cory and Justin made their favorite, traditional camping meal for me and Liz: homemade chili and dutch oven cornbread with gingerbread peach cobbler for dessert- amazing!!  The ending to the day was much better than the beginning :)

Who would mind camping anywhere in a place this beautiful?

The next morning Cory was excited we had camped closer to town so we could eat breakfast at The Golden Loop Cafe- Worst Restaurant in America (and proud of it).  Unfortunately (or extremely fortunately from my point of view), the Golden Loop is now closed.  Also unfortunately the restaurant we ended up going to did not have a working lock on the bathroom door and yes, I was walked in on.  We delayed our trip again by missing the turnoff.  But that meant we got to see this-

What a view!!  And I believe if you look far enough

you can see Arizona in the background :)

We finally got back on the dirt road and made it to the trail head.

The first two miles or so of the hike are out in some open desert.  And full of cows.  Apparently ranchers can still use the land for grazing and there were enough pies out there to prove it.  You could look around for miles and only see rolling hills of sagebrush and then suddenly we were on the edge of the gulch.  Such a beautiful view!!  I'll let the pictures do the rest of the storytelling.



WOW!!!

We opted to enter Coyote Gulch from "Crack in the Wall" and had to lower our packs ~30 feet over the cliff face. 

  

This is where I unthinkingly told Cory to
take a picture of Liz "up the crack."
Stupid double meaning!

It got a little narrow toward the end.





I was obviously the supervisor in this endeavor :)

We had a short, but beautiful walk left until...

I love the canyon walls.  They look like cake dripping with chocolate frosting.  Yum!!



 

...we finally reached the river!  (Coyote is the brown on the left joining the green Escalante on the right)

The final descent into the canyon.

Walking the gulch.  It was really fun climbing over the rocks and the water felt sooo good to our hot, tired feet.  So many photo ops.



  

The leaves on the ground were all silver and some were even sun bleached to the point of being transparent.  I thought it was really cool.

This rock must have fallen not long before we visited.  Look how smooth and clean the break was.  You could see where it would have fit on the opposite cliff wall.

There were lizards everywhere!  Some pretty big ones too.
This little guy surprised me with his excellent camouflage
technique.  Almost smashed him!

Justin and I had just seen Thor so we called
this rock formation "The Hammer of Thor."

There were so many waterfalls walking up the Gulch.

Swiss Cheese Falls was my favorite.

 

 The aptly named Jughandle Arch.

More pretty views.

Jacob Hamblin Arch.

 

Liz found the only shade on the north bank.

 

This is the view from the top on our way out.  You can see
why it's an arch.  The river used to cut through
and then got diverted around it.

And just in case you don't really want to rough it, the nice Park Service people have flown in a bathroom for your convenience.



How random is this!!  No, they do not flush.

All of the guides tell you to actually enter Coyote Gulch by dropping in over a rock slope by Jacob Hamblin and exit via Crack in the Wall.  So glad we did it backwards- look at this slope we hiked out!!

None of us were comfortable doing this climb with our packs.

Funny that any description of this hike calls this part "walkable."  I'm not gonna lie, that was a scary climb.  Especially with packs.  We felt like pansies though when it took us 45 minutes to get 2/3 of the way up and this guy shows up and just walks up the face with a rope tied to his pack (that's the line going up the middle of the second picture).  Just walked up a sandstone cliff basically.  He's obviously done that a few times (he had a tour group waiting at the bottom) and was nice enough to let us use his rope (once he anchored it) to scale the last 20 feet.  We were getting tired so we were grateful not to have to drag our packs up any more rocks :)  After that though it was pretty smooth sailing.  Beautiful views back down into the gulch and much flatter ground.

We took a wrong turn on the trail somewhere and ended up hiking an extra 2 or 3 miles to get back to the car.  Thank goodness Cory had a GPS with him.  We did find a friend on the trail.

I've never been so grateful to see a Honda!  Maybe someday we'll go camping and not forget something or actually find a shorter trail.  But then the story would be really boring :)