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| Backpack | 10.00 Miles |
500 AEG |
| | Backpack | 10.00 Miles | 3 Days | | |
| 500 ft AEG | | 45 LBS Pack | | |
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| no partners | | This hike was wayy off-season. The goal was originally to travel from the Kane Gulch ranger station to the junction with Bullet Canyon and would have made the entire trip over 20 miles. Normally this mileage is not a problem. However, it being the very last week of the off-season, no single BLM ranger had been down there for months. In fact, the entire 3 days I spent in the canyon I saw one person total, a friendly guy on a day hike who himself told me I was the first person he has seen in over 3 weeks of hiking around Cedar Mesa. The place is truly remote and even more-so in the off-season. The rangers actually asked me detailed questions about the conditions once I got back to my car -- I guess a big flash flood had come through sometime a month before. And man, it showed...
The bushwhack was what I would call epic -- to the point I felt like about 50% of the time it was "trail" but was actually straight up off-trail. The other 50% of the time you are walking in the drainage, avoiding the occasional deep mud puddles that will eat you up to your ankles. I averaged about a mile per hour and by the end of a 5 mile day down to the junction of Grand Gulch -- by Junction Ruin, I was pretty cut up and exhausted. The "trail" meanders in and out of the gulch every few hundred feet - the repetition being: hike drainage, cross over onto a trail made of deep beach sand, then cross back over and hike the drainage once again. Compounded with the bushwhacking, it made the hiking slow work.
After day 1 it was pretty clear I wasn't reaching Bullet Canyon, and the weather forecast was turning to thunderstorms in a couple days -- so I decided to make it a 3 day adventure instead of 4. No one wants to be stranded in a deep canyon when flash floods are likely!
Day two was more interesting, I decided I would hike down canyon for as long as possible until I decided it wasn't a good idea any more. Also at that point, I decided to begin avoiding the trail and just hiking the drainage where possible -- this was much faster and possible for most of hiking the gulch south of Kane Gulch. I visited Turkey Pen Ruin and then some other small ruin hidden away off a use trail that I could not find the name of -- about a mile or two NW of Toadie. I did make it pretty close to Toadie Canyon - but was cut short by clouds moving in. At that point it was around noon; time to turn around and high tail it to a high-ground campsite just a short distance north-east of the junction between Kane and Grand (this site was awesome by the way); it is along the final goose-neck of Kane Gulch before it enters Grand Gulch -- look for a use trail traveling upwards about 20 ft off the main trail, heading east. The views are spectacular as you are somewhat raised up from the bottom of the gulch but being in a gooseneck, you feel close to the canyon walls and it was easy to make sounds echo.
Day 3, not so epic- just a short 4 miles back to the car at the ranger station. Only got lost once, staying in the drainage too long and ended up *under* the boulders below the big pour-off. You don't want to go down there. It is a mess of deep mud and slick boulder hopping. If you find yourself doing that in Kane - you've missed a cairn somewhere. Turn around and go find the cairn. Luckily the clouds were just a warning and it did not end up raining at all the entire trip... However I camped that night up on the mesa top and it rained. In the morning I found three -- yes three giant thunder storm systems beginning to converge right over Cedar Mesa. If I had been down in the canyon on the fourth day like my original plan, it would have been a problem for sure. Ultimately I would only ever go back to Kane/Grand/Bullet during the on-season. Off season may appeal to the most adventurous among us. |
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