Following Everett - Coyote Gulch
It feels like I’ve been away years, the strange way that the long walk can stretch time and distort perception. It was only last Friday that I sat at this desk, nervously tapping my feet like a coke-addled rock star in church. So much has passed since then that this all feels unfamiliar, this desk, this computer, these people and their requests and demands.
Graciously, my work day last Friday ended early. My boss, anticipating my impatience, let me take a half-day and leave at 11:00. I went home, napped, checked and double-checked the packs, and loaded the car. Our five packs all fit into the trunk, but barely. Dusty showed up at my house and we played some video game hockey for a bit to kill them time. Then, when Marie got home, we headed off.
After picking Tony and Frank up and stopping at In N’ Out for some dinner, we were all on the road. It was supposed to be an 11 hour drive, but we were planning for traffic. It was 7:00pm, and we had to meet the trailhead shuttle at 9am. At some point, we’d lose an hour crossing into mountain time. It was going to be close.
The drive itself was delirious and unnerving. I drove most of the way and was unable to sleep when someone else was at the wheel. We kept our stops to a minimum, and rolled into Escalante, UT at 6:00am. Next came the hard part, the 40-some miles of the unpaved Hole-in-the-Rock road. My mom’s Toyota Avalaon was, let’s be honest, ill-equipped for the drive, but we had no choice. I drove us carefully, bottoming out badly at several riverbed crossings. At one point, while rattling over the desert washboard of the road, something broke loose and began clunking horribly in the rear-right wheel. Visibly, we detected nothing wrong, but the terrible noise persisted. Oh well, it was too late to turn around, so we continued on.
Eventually, we found ourselves at the red well trailhead, sleepily rubbing eyes, stretching, and putting the last few things into our packs. We had hoped to have time for a nap before the shuttle came, but it wasn’t our day. They rolled up as we were putting the finishing touches onto our packs.
The shuttle only took us another 5-10 miles down the road, to Hurricane Wash. In retrospect, it wasn’t worth our money or his time to drive such a short distance, but we didn’t know at the time of booking. Oh well, live and learn. Once there, we paid our driver (Sean or Shawn, from Escape Goats - a fantastic little company I’d strongly recommend to anyone who needs anything in the Escalante area) and headed off with little ceremony.
We had planned quite an ambitious hike. We would walk into Coyote Gulch from Hurricane Wash and camp somewhere between Coyote Natural Bridge and Cliff Arch. The second day, we would hike down Coyote to the Escalante River and back, camping at the same place. Finally, we would pack all our stuff back out of Coyote Gulch via Big Hollow Wash and the Red Well trailhead, where the car waited. The Garmin put it at 25 miles, but I knew it had skipped several of the twists and meanders of the canyon. I estimated it to be more around 30 miles. As it turns out, we wouldn’t know exactly how long the hike was, for various reasons. More on that later.
Hurricane started off as a sandy wash with some small, interesting rock domes scattered about. However, very quickly in the hike, it began to sink deeper and deeper into the sandstone, becoming an impressive canyon in its own. At one of the more interesting narrow sections (about 10 feet wide and 60 feet deep), Dustin stopped suddenly and pointed us to a tiny rattlesnake, coiled calmly on a rock. We oohed and ahhed and snapped pictures and made mental notes to be aware of rattlesnakes, and then set back off. Some 50 feet further, I’m walking along the trail when a sudden buzzing from the left sent me leaping aside. There, tangled in the branches of an ankle-high scrub, another rattlesnake eyed me angrily. Had I taken another step forward, I may have been in striking distance. It was a bad omen, for sure - but would prove to be a false omen as they would be the only two snakes encountered on the trip.
Eventually, water appeared in Hurricane and it became one of those typical and beautiful Colorado Plateau canyons; fifty feet wide and a thousand feet deep, lined with neck-cracking vertical cliffs and beautiful red domes. We walked in the shallow riverbed, water not deep enough to top the soles of our shoes and soak our feet, until we reached the confluence of Hurricane Wash and Coyote Creek - our entry into Coyote Gulch.
The confluence was eerily quiet. The calm water made no noise, and the air stood still, not daring to disturb even a single leaf of the cottonwood grove that rested at the confluence. We sat on the banks and drank beers as quietly as possible, the slightest rustling of clothes an obscenity to the pure silence that enveloped us. The river was warm and silty, and slipped over the sandy banks without haste. The canyon walls surrounded us like the comforting forms of parents when we’re barely old enough to walk. It was perfection.
I remember the opening to Desert Solitaire. Ed Abbey saying “this is the most beautiful place in the world.” He then goes on to say that each of us have such a place in mind. To Ed, it was Arches National Park. To me, it became Coyote Gulch. As we moved on, each turning of the canyon walls brought me something breathtaking. Something amazing. I could spend a full day at every curve of the canyon and still leave feeling unfulfilled. In every possible place, the vague patterns and dried mud of Anasazi dwellings and granaries haunted the canyon. The tracks of mule deer outnumbered the tracks of humans 100 to 1. Overhead, red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons soared and cried out, echoing back from the sandstone walls like a chorus of birds in response.
Dustin and Frank got ahead of us. We turned a corner to see them sitting in a beautiful amphitheater caused by a curving of the river, looking up and laughing loudly. I thought they were sharing a joke, and set my pack down next to theirs, asking “what’s so funny?”
“Come here,” Dustin said from the middle of the river which hugged the inner wall of the amphitheater. “Look up.”
I hope to never forget what I saw. Words can’t possibly touch it. Pictures blaspheme it with inaccuracy. Perhaps one day the technology will exist to recreate what I saw, but that day is far from now. I saw there, grinning, laughing, and staring a the most incredible thing I had ever seen.
I’m not good with numbers. I don’t know how tall this amphitheater was. Maybe it was 1,000 feet. Maybe 1,500. It was tall. Incomprehensibly, inconceivably tall. You had to lean back to see the top of it. And in a curve more graceful and sensual, more glamorous and beautiful than any actress could ever dream of, the cliff curved overhead and around me like a horseshow. How far overhead? I can’t say. Far. A hundred feet? Two hundred? Maybe three? I don’t know. It was like being in the severed half of an enormous orange dome. On either side, the canyon curved inward, its walls also sloping overhead. I stared until I lost my balance, then leaned against the wall and stared more.
Being on no sleep, tired, dehydrated (it was hot and humid as hell out), and hungry, I was delirious. In a sort of semi-dream state. Leaning against that cool wall, I thought of heartbeats, almost felt them. I felt the stone at my back as I watched it arc far over my head, over the cottonwoods and stone of the canyon. I felt like I was melting into the stone. I never imagined that such a thing could exist as this place. I decided it was my new favorite place. That if we’d turned around and rove another 12 hours home right then and there, it would still be the best hike ever.
Because the amphitheater blocked most of the sky, my Garmin went a little crazy here. I’m not sure if it’s poor or no connection to the satellites, but when it can’t seem to get a strong signal, it tends to “wander.” While standing still under that archway, our position indicator on the Garmin leapt like a seismograph, taking on several miles that we hadn’t walked (how many? I’m not sure). This would repeat often, as we hiked under various bridges, overhangs, and formations, achieving the end result of us having no fucking clue how long we’d walked. This wasn’t a big deal. We had paper maps. Besides, we were in a canyon. There was no getting lost. But, it made it hard to gauge just how far of a hike we had to look forward to in the next two days, and how to plan for it.
Only a couple curves later, we came to the first arch - Jacob Hamblin Arch. This, too, was located in another stunning horseshoe amphitheater. As the walls curved in a giant U shape, the arch itself was cut into one of the arms of the U. I’ve seen pictures of the arch, but I had never had any indication of the absolute immensity of the arch. Once again, numbers escape me, but it was the tremendous. The arm of the arch was the width of a city bus and towered far above the canyon floor. A tanker ship could have been driven through the opening. We stopped again next to a spring at the bottom of the arch to admire it and snack, then we headed on.
A few miles past this, after startling a large mule deer with impressive antlers, we made camp in a smaller amphitheater on a sandy bench just above the river. We took our shoes off and enjoyed a splash of scotch in a plastic cup while our feet dried in the sand. Yellowjackets pestered us (and would for the entirety of our stay at this camp). Somewhere just beyond our camp, the river suddenly grow loud, and we ventured barefoot a half mile past camp to explore. We found a small stone section where several waterfalls cut strange patterns into the riverbed (including one pool that was well over six feet deep - very impressive considering the deepest part of the river I’d found up until that point was still considerably below my knees). Just after those, another deep section (and the sudden peals of thunder from downcanyon) sent us turning back to camp. We ate, laughed, and went to sleep before darkfall.
Rain woke us up. And thunder. And wind coming up the canyon like a freight train. It rained all night, mostly soft pattering but occasionally becoming intense and fierce. The tent kept Marie and I dry and, judging from the snoring coming from across camp, we assumed everyone else was okay. Nonetheless, we slept little, constantly startled awake by the blinding flash of lightning and rumbling of thunder (and if you’ve never heard thunder roaring down a canyon like a flood, it may be the most beautiful sound ever made). The next morning, we learned that our tent was the only one to hold up to the rain. Dusty, Tony, and Frank all slept in relative stages of wetness. Dustin’s sleeping bag was soaked and 10lbs heavier. Frank had a large puddle in his tent to dry out. Tony had water dripping on his head all night. We all looked like shit.
Rain was expected, but it was supposed to be scattered thunderstorms. This was all night. The next night, an even larger storm with more sustained rain was expected. I thought of the 40 miles of dirt road to get out - of the already-eroded streambed crossings. We discussed it and came to the torturous decision to cut our trip short - to hike out that day, after only one night in the canyon, rather than risk being stranded on that road by the rain. It killed me, but it was the smart choice.
I insisted we at least hike upriver to Coyote Natural Bridge before turning back. Marie stayed at camp to sleep more (she slept the worst of all of us, I think), and Dusty, Tony, Frank and I put some water in our daypacks and walked downriver.
After the stunning immensity of Jacob Hamblin Arch, Coyote Natural Bridge was somewhat anticlimactic. This isn’t to say it wasn’t beautiful and amazing. It was. We decided to walk a little more, and came to a large alcove of the canyon with a trail winding up the side to a flat ledge 500 feet up. Ruins.
We climbed. At the top, some artifacts were piled on flat rocks. Corncobs, bones, potshards. Nearby, three figures gazed down from pictographs. I braved snakes to explore the opposite side of the alcove, finding another pictograph of a basket. We walked back to camp, packed up, filtered our water, and headed back.
It rained on and off on the hike back, creating numerous waterfalls and streams in cliffs that walled us in. The water level visibly rose some, and we were all on edge. Then, as we branched off onto Big Hollow Wash, the rain stopped and the sun came out. The last miles to the car were in the muddy wash. With each step, your shoes picked up more mud until they were unbearably heavy. It was exhausting. Finally, we climbed out of the canyon and got to the car.
The drive out was uneventful. We decided to head to Mesquite, NV, so Dustin, Frank and Tony could gamble a bit. Marie and I got steaks and a couple drinks, then went to bed at 10, after showering. The rest of them came in at 4am. Then we drove the rest of the way home the next day.
It’s always rough, cutting a trip short. I was looking forward to Stevens Arch on the Escalante - to walking down the new canyons born out of the receding lake, to seeing the side canyons and the rest of Coyote Gulch. But it was still worth it. It always is. And I stand by it: this is the most beautiful place in the world.
Coyote Gulch
Graciously, my work day last Friday ended early. My boss, anticipating my impatience, let me take a half-day and leave at 11:00. I went home, napped, checked and double-checked the packs, and loaded the car. Our five packs all fit into the trunk, but barely. Dusty showed up at my house and we played some video game hockey for a bit to kill them time. Then, when Marie got home, we headed off.
After picking Tony and Frank up and stopping at In N’ Out for some dinner, we were all on the road. It was supposed to be an 11 hour drive, but we were planning for traffic. It was 7:00pm, and we had to meet the trailhead shuttle at 9am. At some point, we’d lose an hour crossing into mountain time. It was going to be close.
The drive itself was delirious and unnerving. I drove most of the way and was unable to sleep when someone else was at the wheel. We kept our stops to a minimum, and rolled into Escalante, UT at 6:00am. Next came the hard part, the 40-some miles of the unpaved Hole-in-the-Rock road. My mom’s Toyota Avalaon was, let’s be honest, ill-equipped for the drive, but we had no choice. I drove us carefully, bottoming out badly at several riverbed crossings. At one point, while rattling over the desert washboard of the road, something broke loose and began clunking horribly in the rear-right wheel. Visibly, we detected nothing wrong, but the terrible noise persisted. Oh well, it was too late to turn around, so we continued on.
Eventually, we found ourselves at the red well trailhead, sleepily rubbing eyes, stretching, and putting the last few things into our packs. We had hoped to have time for a nap before the shuttle came, but it wasn’t our day. They rolled up as we were putting the finishing touches onto our packs.
The shuttle only took us another 5-10 miles down the road, to Hurricane Wash. In retrospect, it wasn’t worth our money or his time to drive such a short distance, but we didn’t know at the time of booking. Oh well, live and learn. Once there, we paid our driver (Sean or Shawn, from Escape Goats - a fantastic little company I’d strongly recommend to anyone who needs anything in the Escalante area) and headed off with little ceremony.
We had planned quite an ambitious hike. We would walk into Coyote Gulch from Hurricane Wash and camp somewhere between Coyote Natural Bridge and Cliff Arch. The second day, we would hike down Coyote to the Escalante River and back, camping at the same place. Finally, we would pack all our stuff back out of Coyote Gulch via Big Hollow Wash and the Red Well trailhead, where the car waited. The Garmin put it at 25 miles, but I knew it had skipped several of the twists and meanders of the canyon. I estimated it to be more around 30 miles. As it turns out, we wouldn’t know exactly how long the hike was, for various reasons. More on that later.
Hurricane started off as a sandy wash with some small, interesting rock domes scattered about. However, very quickly in the hike, it began to sink deeper and deeper into the sandstone, becoming an impressive canyon in its own. At one of the more interesting narrow sections (about 10 feet wide and 60 feet deep), Dustin stopped suddenly and pointed us to a tiny rattlesnake, coiled calmly on a rock. We oohed and ahhed and snapped pictures and made mental notes to be aware of rattlesnakes, and then set back off. Some 50 feet further, I’m walking along the trail when a sudden buzzing from the left sent me leaping aside. There, tangled in the branches of an ankle-high scrub, another rattlesnake eyed me angrily. Had I taken another step forward, I may have been in striking distance. It was a bad omen, for sure - but would prove to be a false omen as they would be the only two snakes encountered on the trip.
Eventually, water appeared in Hurricane and it became one of those typical and beautiful Colorado Plateau canyons; fifty feet wide and a thousand feet deep, lined with neck-cracking vertical cliffs and beautiful red domes. We walked in the shallow riverbed, water not deep enough to top the soles of our shoes and soak our feet, until we reached the confluence of Hurricane Wash and Coyote Creek - our entry into Coyote Gulch.
The confluence was eerily quiet. The calm water made no noise, and the air stood still, not daring to disturb even a single leaf of the cottonwood grove that rested at the confluence. We sat on the banks and drank beers as quietly as possible, the slightest rustling of clothes an obscenity to the pure silence that enveloped us. The river was warm and silty, and slipped over the sandy banks without haste. The canyon walls surrounded us like the comforting forms of parents when we’re barely old enough to walk. It was perfection.
I remember the opening to Desert Solitaire. Ed Abbey saying “this is the most beautiful place in the world.” He then goes on to say that each of us have such a place in mind. To Ed, it was Arches National Park. To me, it became Coyote Gulch. As we moved on, each turning of the canyon walls brought me something breathtaking. Something amazing. I could spend a full day at every curve of the canyon and still leave feeling unfulfilled. In every possible place, the vague patterns and dried mud of Anasazi dwellings and granaries haunted the canyon. The tracks of mule deer outnumbered the tracks of humans 100 to 1. Overhead, red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons soared and cried out, echoing back from the sandstone walls like a chorus of birds in response.
Dustin and Frank got ahead of us. We turned a corner to see them sitting in a beautiful amphitheater caused by a curving of the river, looking up and laughing loudly. I thought they were sharing a joke, and set my pack down next to theirs, asking “what’s so funny?”
“Come here,” Dustin said from the middle of the river which hugged the inner wall of the amphitheater. “Look up.”
I hope to never forget what I saw. Words can’t possibly touch it. Pictures blaspheme it with inaccuracy. Perhaps one day the technology will exist to recreate what I saw, but that day is far from now. I saw there, grinning, laughing, and staring a the most incredible thing I had ever seen.
I’m not good with numbers. I don’t know how tall this amphitheater was. Maybe it was 1,000 feet. Maybe 1,500. It was tall. Incomprehensibly, inconceivably tall. You had to lean back to see the top of it. And in a curve more graceful and sensual, more glamorous and beautiful than any actress could ever dream of, the cliff curved overhead and around me like a horseshow. How far overhead? I can’t say. Far. A hundred feet? Two hundred? Maybe three? I don’t know. It was like being in the severed half of an enormous orange dome. On either side, the canyon curved inward, its walls also sloping overhead. I stared until I lost my balance, then leaned against the wall and stared more.
Being on no sleep, tired, dehydrated (it was hot and humid as hell out), and hungry, I was delirious. In a sort of semi-dream state. Leaning against that cool wall, I thought of heartbeats, almost felt them. I felt the stone at my back as I watched it arc far over my head, over the cottonwoods and stone of the canyon. I felt like I was melting into the stone. I never imagined that such a thing could exist as this place. I decided it was my new favorite place. That if we’d turned around and rove another 12 hours home right then and there, it would still be the best hike ever.
Because the amphitheater blocked most of the sky, my Garmin went a little crazy here. I’m not sure if it’s poor or no connection to the satellites, but when it can’t seem to get a strong signal, it tends to “wander.” While standing still under that archway, our position indicator on the Garmin leapt like a seismograph, taking on several miles that we hadn’t walked (how many? I’m not sure). This would repeat often, as we hiked under various bridges, overhangs, and formations, achieving the end result of us having no fucking clue how long we’d walked. This wasn’t a big deal. We had paper maps. Besides, we were in a canyon. There was no getting lost. But, it made it hard to gauge just how far of a hike we had to look forward to in the next two days, and how to plan for it.
Only a couple curves later, we came to the first arch - Jacob Hamblin Arch. This, too, was located in another stunning horseshoe amphitheater. As the walls curved in a giant U shape, the arch itself was cut into one of the arms of the U. I’ve seen pictures of the arch, but I had never had any indication of the absolute immensity of the arch. Once again, numbers escape me, but it was the tremendous. The arm of the arch was the width of a city bus and towered far above the canyon floor. A tanker ship could have been driven through the opening. We stopped again next to a spring at the bottom of the arch to admire it and snack, then we headed on.
A few miles past this, after startling a large mule deer with impressive antlers, we made camp in a smaller amphitheater on a sandy bench just above the river. We took our shoes off and enjoyed a splash of scotch in a plastic cup while our feet dried in the sand. Yellowjackets pestered us (and would for the entirety of our stay at this camp). Somewhere just beyond our camp, the river suddenly grow loud, and we ventured barefoot a half mile past camp to explore. We found a small stone section where several waterfalls cut strange patterns into the riverbed (including one pool that was well over six feet deep - very impressive considering the deepest part of the river I’d found up until that point was still considerably below my knees). Just after those, another deep section (and the sudden peals of thunder from downcanyon) sent us turning back to camp. We ate, laughed, and went to sleep before darkfall.
Rain woke us up. And thunder. And wind coming up the canyon like a freight train. It rained all night, mostly soft pattering but occasionally becoming intense and fierce. The tent kept Marie and I dry and, judging from the snoring coming from across camp, we assumed everyone else was okay. Nonetheless, we slept little, constantly startled awake by the blinding flash of lightning and rumbling of thunder (and if you’ve never heard thunder roaring down a canyon like a flood, it may be the most beautiful sound ever made). The next morning, we learned that our tent was the only one to hold up to the rain. Dusty, Tony, and Frank all slept in relative stages of wetness. Dustin’s sleeping bag was soaked and 10lbs heavier. Frank had a large puddle in his tent to dry out. Tony had water dripping on his head all night. We all looked like shit.
Rain was expected, but it was supposed to be scattered thunderstorms. This was all night. The next night, an even larger storm with more sustained rain was expected. I thought of the 40 miles of dirt road to get out - of the already-eroded streambed crossings. We discussed it and came to the torturous decision to cut our trip short - to hike out that day, after only one night in the canyon, rather than risk being stranded on that road by the rain. It killed me, but it was the smart choice.
I insisted we at least hike upriver to Coyote Natural Bridge before turning back. Marie stayed at camp to sleep more (she slept the worst of all of us, I think), and Dusty, Tony, Frank and I put some water in our daypacks and walked downriver.
After the stunning immensity of Jacob Hamblin Arch, Coyote Natural Bridge was somewhat anticlimactic. This isn’t to say it wasn’t beautiful and amazing. It was. We decided to walk a little more, and came to a large alcove of the canyon with a trail winding up the side to a flat ledge 500 feet up. Ruins.
We climbed. At the top, some artifacts were piled on flat rocks. Corncobs, bones, potshards. Nearby, three figures gazed down from pictographs. I braved snakes to explore the opposite side of the alcove, finding another pictograph of a basket. We walked back to camp, packed up, filtered our water, and headed back.
It rained on and off on the hike back, creating numerous waterfalls and streams in cliffs that walled us in. The water level visibly rose some, and we were all on edge. Then, as we branched off onto Big Hollow Wash, the rain stopped and the sun came out. The last miles to the car were in the muddy wash. With each step, your shoes picked up more mud until they were unbearably heavy. It was exhausting. Finally, we climbed out of the canyon and got to the car.
The drive out was uneventful. We decided to head to Mesquite, NV, so Dustin, Frank and Tony could gamble a bit. Marie and I got steaks and a couple drinks, then went to bed at 10, after showering. The rest of them came in at 4am. Then we drove the rest of the way home the next day.
It’s always rough, cutting a trip short. I was looking forward to Stevens Arch on the Escalante - to walking down the new canyons born out of the receding lake, to seeing the side canyons and the rest of Coyote Gulch. But it was still worth it. It always is. And I stand by it: this is the most beautiful place in the world.
Coyote Gulch