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| | Wire Pass - Buckskin Gulch - Paria Canyon, UT | | | |
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Wire Pass - Buckskin Gulch - Paria Canyon, UT
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| Backpack | 42.00 Miles |
314 AEG |
| | Backpack | 42.00 Miles | 4 Days | | |
| 314 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | I did this hike with my 14 year old son, along with my friend Sam and his son. We did the hike in an unconventional manner because of a last minute change in plans. Our original plan was to hike from the Whitehouse Trailhead down Paria Canyon to Wrather Arch and back in four days; however, my son woke me up in the middle of the night at Whitehouse Campground the night before we were to start hiking to tell me that he didn’t feel so good, and then proceeded the throw up six times within an hour. Fortunately he felt better the next morning, but nonetheless we decided it would be prudent to day hike from Wire Pass Trailhead into Buckskin Gulch rather than backpack down Paria Canyon with full overnight packs.
So, for our first day we hiked about six miles into Buckskin Gulch and then back out again. Buckskin Gulch is an amazing natural wonder. I had visited Lower Antelope Canyon with my family last fall, and while Lower Antelope has more color, and more finely featured swoops and turns, the crowds and tour guides with cattle prods made for a less than spectacular experience. (I’m just kidding about the cattle prods, but only barely.) Buckskin Gulch, on the other hand, was relatively deserted, and it seemed to go on forever. Whatever it lacked in nuance it made up for in quantity and variety.
At one point during our hike I noticed an interesting feature on the canyon wall about 100 feet up. It looked a bit like an Indian feather head dress, or maybe a small section of white picket fence. It didn’t necessarily look natural, and it didn’t seem to fit with the surrounding cliff walls, but then again it was hard to imagine how or why someone could have put something like that so far up on the cliff wall. More on this below…
After another night at the Whitehouse Campground, we started our second day of hiking by heading down Paria Canyon. Paria Canyon was not nearly as visually stunning as Buckskin Canyon, at least until we reached Slide Rock Arch. However, for my money, Paria Canyon from Slide Rock Arch down to the Confluence was one of the best parts of the trip. The canyon walls are so tall and sheer that I felt like I was walking in a landscape made for giants. Wading through the knee-deep, muddy yellow Paria all the while made it even more memorable.
At the Confluence we turned up Buckskin Gulch, dropped our packs at the campsites just upstream, then headed further back down Paria Canyon in search of the 10-mile spring. I had seen online photos of hikers posing in the uniquely shaped vertical fault lines that occur several places in this stretch, so I asked Sam and the boys to pose for photos too; however, quicksand prevented them from getting within 20 feet of any of the fault lines. There was a fair amount of quicksand over this stretch.
On the way back up canyon from the spring we found a clue to identity of the mysterious structure on the canyon wall we saw in Buckskin Gulch the day before. At one point we found some bee honeycomb on the ground; while we stopped to look at the honeycomb, I happened to glance upward, and I noticed a structure on the cliff wall overhead exactly like the one I had seen the day before in Buckskin Gulch. Therefore, I’m pretty sure it was a bees’ nest. I’ve included photos of this structure and the honeycomb in the photoset for this triplog.
Back at the Confluence campsites, we camped at the site on the south side of the creek. Five parties camped on the other side of the creek. The canyon was so echo-y that we could almost everyone’s conversations as if they were right next to us. It made you want to whisper.
The following day we hiked up Buckskin Gulch to the Middle Route and back. The rabbit hole at the Boulder Jam was open but it required a wade through a pool of unknown depth, so we chose to climb over the Jam using the semi-permanent webbing instead. Not far above the Jam we had to wade through a stretch of thigh-deep water, so we ended up getting a little wet anyway.
I found the lower portion of Buckskin Gulch even more impressive than the upper end. It wasn’t as narrow, but it was definitely deeper. At times the sunlight was almost blocked, and the air was chilly.
The climb up the Middle Route was definitely worth it, just to see the outside world for a few minutes. It was a jarring experience, after having spent 1-1/2 days in the canyon and feeling isolated from the outside world, to climb up the canyon walls a few feet and then to suddenly find oneself back in the Utah desert. The temperature change added to the effect when the pervasive cold of the canyon was suddenly replaced by the desert heat.
The climb was fairly easy, except that all of the climbing surfaces were sloped slightly downward and covered with a fine layer of sand that felt a bit like thousands of tiny ball bearings. Surfaces that otherwise would have been easy to stand on did not feel so safe. I’ve seen online images of a route that goes straight up the crevice, but that seems like the hard way to do it; we had good luck criss-crossing back and forth, at least on the lower portion.
We spent another night at the Confluence, and strangely enough, this night we had the whole area to ourselves. I had been irritated by the crowd the first night there but the second night actually seemed lonely. We found that we could pump water from Buckskin Creek by digging a hole in the sand, lining it with flat rocks, and then waiting for the creek's flow to remove the muddy water from the basin, so we didn’t have to make another trip to the 10-mile spring.
The following morning we had an uneventful hike back to the Whitehouse Trailhead.
Overall we hiked about 42 miles over our four days, essentially hiking the Wire Pass Trailhead to Whitehouse Trailhead route both directions except for a couple of miles in the middle of Buckskin Gulch that we missed altogether, plus tacking on the short trip to the 10-mile spring.
I’ve had enough slot canyon hiking for a while, but Sam and I agreed that we do it again a couple of years, and next time we'll hike from Wire Pass to Lees Ferry, with a short detour from the Confluence up to Slide Rock Arch just to see that stretch of Paria again.
A quick warning about the human waste bags (which we affectionately dubbed “Silver Bullets”) issued by the BLM with overnight permits. While it is true that the BLM will provide you with the bags when you pick up your permit, what they don’t tell you ahead of time is that each person only gets one. If you’re backpacking for more than a day or two and you don’t want to use your silver bullets more than once, you should bring some of your own. (It’s obvious once you get into the canyon why the bags are required – there’s just not enough dig-able real estate in much of the canyon to support lots of cat holes.) |
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