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| no partners | | After deciding I was too far behind schedule and the Little C was too wet and silty for my intended trip down from Cameron to the Confluence, last week I made a hasty retrieval of a supply cache I placed two days prior down at the bottom of Horse Trail Canyon on the LCR.
Many thanks to HikeAZ folks who shared info on this pleasantly short and relatively easy route down to what will remain my intended supply cache location for a future trip down the Little C!
Getting there:
The trailhead actually took me a very long time to find, because I was silly enough not to have saved a GPS waypoint for it, and I also had read a report here suggesting it was easy to find. To be clear, anything is easy to find with a waypoint, but without that, and no other specifics about where to enter this canyon, it is less than obvious. I posted tracks from this trip, so if you want to save a couple hours of banging around the rez, you can download them and avoid all that exploratory adventure. 
Basically, you take US 89 to Navaja 6134, follow it west 13-14 miles, then while crossing Navajo 6133, juke left onto a small two-track road and follow it to a right turn onto another small track with a cairn. This was the *only* side road that was cairned, and the only way I found the trail head. So, many thanks to whoever placed that cairn!
The Route:
As with finding the trail head, getting started on the route required a wee bit of looking. There is a cairn visible from the parking area that leads you west and down to a flat layer above the drainage. I was tempted to contour left toward the top of the obvious drainage to the south, but that's not the cairned route. Instead, stay pretty much west until hitting the edge of of the drainage and possibly seeing another cairn on the way. It might take a bit of glassing the terrain for cairns, but they are there, and they will take you down to the gravel in the wash/creek bed. From there the route will be quite obvious for folks familiar with traveling down washes and canyons. There are a couple pouroffs that will force a go-around to one side or the other. The main obstacle is a very large pour off that is maybe a third of the way down the canyon. The trail stays creek right and traverses quite a ways until necessarily heading steeply down into the creek bed again. (This is strenuous on the hike out!) You'll cross over to creek left again half to 2/3 of the way down and then just above the river you come to the odd bridge of small logs and flat stones that presumably protects a semi technical move of stepping left around a protruding rock/wall and then down to a ledge. Below that you end up crossing to creek right again, traversing above the river for a bit and then finally making the last drop through a steep layer to the river.
My moving time on this round-trip hike was about 2h 10m, but that was double-timing it down the canyon with a mostly empty pack with no time spent for photos or much drinking in of the steep, jagged beauty of the place. Unless you have a train to catch, I would recommend spending four hours or so, depending on fitness, pack, etc. It's a strenuous climb out.
Observations:
As others have said, this is the easiest route I have taken to reach the LCR from atop the impressive gorge. It is hard to picture horses going down it, but it is child's play compared to Blue Spring Trail, and both easier and shorter than Hopi Salt Trail. My plan is to use it as access for caching, but others have used it to connect with Salt Trail as a loop hike, and that would be quite pleasant, too. Really love the idea of using mountain bikes to shuttle between trail heads!
Be sure to pack enough water for the return/continued trip. Any water found in this part of LCR is sure to be nothing but chocolate silt. |
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Autumn Foliage Observation None
Dry, dry, desolate - scrubby and no flowers. |
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Route Editor
Route Scout
Made the easy hike to the first minor drop off, skirting it on the left, and hit a huge droppff that you bypass on the right. The path is fairly easy to follow with many great placed cairns most of the way. Thank you so much Cairn Fairy. 
Take the rugged path down to the drainage and follow it aways and eventually you hit the hole-in-the-rock and the precarious bridge. The trail then skirts along a bench downstream, by the dryfall, under some overhangs & leaning slab, and eventually heads down the river when you're below another small side canyon. The river was lightly flowing with clear water while we took a long lunch break. For some reason I was under the impression that it would be either dry or flowing with muddy water, but I'm guessing this was snow runoff. In the planing stage, I was thinking we could attempt a trek down to Blue Springs, but the hike down was just too arduous and time consuming plus we still needed to drive home afterwards. 
We decided very early on to just hike down to the river, eat lunch, and hike out. The hike out didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would, now that we knew the way. We'll have to come back and possibly backpack down to the Blue Springs or just plan a full day to hike down there and back. I'm definely making another trip to the beautiful LCRG. 
