Thanks all for this incredible feedback! I am humbled by and appreciative of this community. It's so rare to find a group of people who know so much
and are also generous with that knowledge.
I am regrouping and going back to the drawing board on this trip to try to balance safety and joy with remoteness and ambition.
This may be the only opportunity I have for a trip of this length any time in the next bunch of years. Getting off the grid for an extended period of time is the top priority for this trip. I'm willing to trade off most things for this.
That said, it's clear that my initial trip was WAYYY too ambitious.
It seems my choices are either to a) look at other destinations to accomplish my goal of a 10-14 night jaunt in april or b) tone down my escalante ambitions like so:
1. Start with a shorter 2-3 day trip to shakeout my gear, understand the area and adjust my plans for a longer trip. Right now I'm looking at an out and back on the Boulder Mail Trail as a good representation of the area.
2. Do a version of
this trip from doingmiles (click for link). They did it in 6 days. My plan would be to set aside 10 days. I would make a small modification to hike Little Death Hollow instead of wolverine canyon.
My intention is to cache food (and water) at the Lower Gulch Trailhead and water at spencer flats road.
If I'm not feeling great, I can arrange a shuttle from The Lower Gulch, Wolverine or Phipps Arch Trailhead with my PLB (or my emergency contact can).
If I'm making good time, there are lots of opportunities to day hike and double up at a campsite.
It seems like the major cruxes of this route are:
1. the long dry stretches–particularly from phipps wash to the harris wash trailhead
mitigate with water cache at spencer flats road, 8L carrying capacity
2. route finding between red breaks and the escalante and harris wash and the escalante
mitigate with google earth research, caltopo on my phone, printed maps + compass
3. obstacles in the gulch, red breaks and big horn canyons
mitigate with intel, webbing/rope to lift a pack, extreme caution
Here are my open questions:
1. Is this still too ambitious? Is there another part of the world where I can more safely plan a 10-14 day trip in April?
2.
@Bob why do you carry webbing not rope? what kind of webbing?
3. Does anyone have beta on the obstacles mentioned above? Are there major obstacles I'm missing?
4. The guidebooks I have seem to say that Death Hollow is some of the most intense hiking in the area. As such, I was skipping it on my warm up trip. Would y'all agree?
5.
@priz1234 do you have a sense if going one direction or the other through the gulch would be easier?
6.
@MikeP I'd love your big horn canyon intel.
PS: sorry it took so long to respond to all of this, I was digesting and figuring out a plan...