canyonlands

Spring break this year took me to Salt Creek Canyon in Canyonlands NP where I enjoyed four days of solitude on trail. I wish it had been more, but a few days here and there throughout the year are about all that I can squeeze in with work and other obligations these days. I am in the camp that...

I’m finally getting around to writing up a report for my White Rim trip over the weekend of March 19th. A buddy of mine got an overnight permit at Murphy’s Hogback and he invited my son and me to come along with him and another friend. This is the second time I’ve been to the white Rim but the...

----------------------------------- A trip from one year ago, before the current Coronavirus crisis. ----------------------------------- "Oh my goodness ... my boots, my boots ... I'm not wearing my boots !" I shouted at the driver to please not leave, just yet. I was sitting in the shuttle...

Some time back towards the first of the year, @Jackson had mentioned a desire to get a winter camping trip in. I'm all about winter, so I offered to head out with him if we could work out a location and time. Work it out we did, with our sights set on Island in the Sky for a few days...

In November I decided that it was time to finally finish hiking all of the 'official trails' in the Island in the Sky like I had done with The Needles last year. While I had hiked almost all of the trails on top of the mesa, I had not hiked any that went from the top down to the White Rim. It...

Part 1 of the trip report available here “The canyons are calling, and I must go ”. I don’t think John Muir would mind too much if I misquote him. Muir was heading into the mountains of course, but today this famous quote from the great Scottish Naturalist, and ‘father’ of the US National...

Hey everyone, originally this was going to be my first solo vacation but a few weeks before I was to start my drive from the Chicago suburbs my dad called me up and asked if he could tag along. So it became our first father son road trip, thankfully it went smoothly! His plan was to camp in Dead...

A couple weeks back myself, @scoags, and another friend made the long drive out to Utah from Illinois. We had planned a similar trip for the previous year that had to be cancelled at the last minute, so anticipation was high. We arrived at Horseshoe Canyon in the late afternoon with the plan of...

After this trip report I will be caught up on all my big adventures from last year. A year ago we made the trip down to Canyonlands to do some backpacking. We had originally planned on 5-6 of us going, but due to various circumstances only three of us were able to make it. This was the first...

It has been cold and snowy up here in Montana, so my brother and I decided to head south, looking for a place we hadn't been before. Moab caught our eye, and sort of on a whim we set up a few days to make the 11 hour road trip down. The temps weren't warm by any means, but better than what we...

I'm stealing a bit of Brian's thunder here, but hey I have more spare time than him, so here goes nothing: In April of this year, I was invited along on a trip to the Maze District of Canyonlands National Park, near Moab, UT. The Grand Canyon last year got my interest up in desert...

My first trip to The Maze was in 2011. We took two Tacomas on the 4WD route through Teapot Canyon and spent several nights in The Land of Standing Rocks, including a night backpacking in the canyons. The following year I took a jet boat in from Moab and spent 4 days and 38 miles backpacking from...

So there I was, cruising south on Highway 6 in the LED spaceship, about 30 miles south of Wellington. After my last solo trip I decided to get back on the podcast bandwagon and I was totally entertained by season 1 of Serial. But a nagging thought kept popping to the foreground. I do not want to...

Its been a year since I made this trip and I'm only finally getting around to posting something. Part of the reluctance is due to the other great reports on this web site. I don't really have anything to add and a lot of my pictures are repeats of ones found on those other reports. But, it was a...

Took the dog out for 3 days solo in mid January to a seldom travelled area between Lower Indian Creek and the river. Not hugely spectacular, but certainly lonely and vast. Even with the significant snow cover in our area there was bare rock to travel on. Only a few passages were as sketchy as...

Lower Cataract Canyon Loop November 20, 2015 Finding a non-technical west side entrance to lower (far south of Spanish Bottom) Cataract Canyon can be a challenge. This trip had been proposed a year earlier but it was shelved for other plans. The time seemed right this past October to...

As soon as the boys finished finals the second to last week in Aug we packed up the Jeep and headed for Beef Basin. Although we left early we did not get to the turn off from 211 to Beef Basin road until after dark. (We were messing around looking at small furry animals through a high powered...

I have been cleaning up some of my old posts, I had a hard drive failure and a lot of broken links for the pics. This is a trip from 2015. There are 2 days in the year that belong to ME, and that is my birthday and fathers day. My son say's fathers day does not count, as it is a "Hallmark...

The river canyon is a frigid inhospitable defile this time of the year. Cold still air, heavy and shadowy and unwanted elsewhere, silently settle in, wrapping the occasional stir in a promise of death. Glaring rays of low winter sun, finding their way down through a rare dip in the canyon walls...

11/11/2015 Usually the "Fee Free Day" holidays keep me away from the national parks. They are a pretty good way for a park to over-crowd in the off season. But the big storm that descended upon the area the day before had dumped 4-5 inches of snow on the mesa. How could I not go out and see...