san rafael swell

Exploring the Swell, June 2011 Day 1 Like every June I started my annual Utah trip in Salt Lake City. After I picked up my rental car, I decided to spent a little bit of time again in the Swell. I headed down toward Castle Dale and turned onto the Green River Cutoff Road. I've been here...

Day 1 So, this was to be our first official camping trip of the year. We typically get out camping around Bill's birthday, but this was our own trip and we could not coordinate our schedules to be there when Bill was going (which is the following weekend). We brought my brother's Russ, Jeff...

Mid Nov 2011 Living up in the icebox of Cache Valley the winters are something I just dread. So when my friend suggested we head south to warmer temps and do some hiking I couldn’t say no! I had wanted to hit Angels Landing for many years so we decided to do that. In the planning the trip, we...

February 2011 In December of last year I planned a trip to a formation along the Utah-Arizona border known as White Pocket. The information I found told me that it was an endeavor not to be taken lightly. It's a long drive on remote sand tracks through the desert. Without the proper equipment...

Day 1 Cabin fever had been set in for a LONG time, especially for Alene. I was fortunate enough to be able to slip out to some desert hiking in a January trip to St George back in January, so I had had a tiny fix. Since we are having an unusually cold winter, we decided to get a hotel in...

Ever since I had read about Eardley Canyon in the Kelsey guide I had been fascinated with wanting to attempt this canyon. I had never been canyoneering before in my life. I had done some rappelling down some cliff faces in camp, but that was the gist of it. To prepare for this trip I did a lot...

We froze the previous night and Bailey slept well. We were so worried about both her and Caiden that they were going to freeze to death and we would never know it, but they were fine. Since it was so cold on Saturday morning, we just stayed in the tent for a good hour trying to stay warm, hoping...

Note: Some of these pictures were taken with my iphone's "hipstamatic" camera, which I really like. Sorry if they don't look a little over-processed. This was the 6th year in a row that we've done a camping trip to the Swell in March, but this one was cut a day short due to weather. Still, we...

January 2011 It had been about a month since I made it out camping so Summit and I threw together a quick trip to the Swell over the weekend. The low temps picked up from the usual single digits all the way up to the mid-to-high teens so it seemed like a good opportunity to get outside. We...

September 2010 I made it down to the San Rafael Swell this past weekend. I hadn't spent much time there since I was a kid so my plan was to load up Nikita and do a lot of driving around mixed in with a couple of short day hikes. Day 1 started from Salt Lake, after stopping in Green River for...

I haven't even gotten this trip report up on my website yet, but this seems like a good place to post it first. :) Over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend I hiked and camped along the San Rafael Reef near the Temple Mountain/Goblin Valley junction. On Sunday I hiked up Farnsworth...