We spent Tuesday, September 21st, getting acclimated to our new location. Escalante, Utah, is a small town located in the midst of the Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument and the Dixie National Forest, with Bryce Canyon National Park 45 miles to the west and Capitol Reef National Park 65 miles to the northeast. We went grocery shopping and had dinner at Escalante Outfitters, a combination of outdoor retailer, pub and the local state liquor store. We had a great Apricot beer on tap and fabulous salad and sandwich. The owners of the RV Park (Ben & Lacy) have two daughters, Nivea (10) and Dahlia (8). We have engaged them to be our dog walkers while we take trips in the area.
On Wednesday, September 22nd, we drove to Bryce Canyon City, just north of Bryce Canyon National Park, and joined a Bryce Canyon Tour on a small bus with Oscar as our tour guide. Oscar was extremely entertaining. He said that he had grown up in Tropic, UT, right next door to Bryce Canyon and had spent his teen years hiking the park and working there for his grandmother, who was in charge of housekeeping for the Bryce Canyon Lodge. He said that the canyon was named for Ebenezer Bryce, a Scottish former ship builder, who was sent to Paria, UT, by the Mormon Church in 1875 to build churches. Legend claims the “Bryce Canyon” name stuck due to his unsuccessful attempts to raise cattle in the area. After losing one too many cows to the endlessly lonely labyrinth of rock formations, Ebenezer Bryce is quoted grumbling that an amphitheater is a “hell of a place to lose a cow.” Although Bryce moved his family to Arizona in 1880 to settle a new area, his name remained the nickname for this curious southern rock maze long after his departure. It wasn’t until 1928 that the area was officially designated as “Bryce Canyon National Park,” immortalizing Bryce’s presence in the area forever.
Walt hiked the Lower Calf Creek Falls trail on Thursday, September 23rd. This trail starts in the depths of the Calf Creek Canyon on the road between Escalante and Boulder, Utah. The trail travels north up the floor of the canyon for three miles to a tall waterfall. The falls are 130 feet high, with a deep swimming hole underneath them. The entire creek is surrounded by greenery, but particularly underneath the spray of the waterfall.
Walt hiked the Lower Calf Creek Falls trail on Thursday, September 23rd. This trail starts in the depths of the Calf Creek Canyon on the road between Escalante and Boulder, Utah. The trail travels north up the floor of the canyon for three miles to a tall waterfall. The falls are 130 feet high, with a deep swimming hole underneath them. The entire creek is surrounded by greenery, but particularly underneath the spray of the waterfall.
This week has been the Escalante Arts Festival (https://escalantecanyonsartfestival.org/), so on Friday, September 24th, we went to visit the festival. We saw a musical husband and wife act perform: we had seen them also at the Escapees Escapade in Wyoming in July and Martha bought an Indian Flute to learn to play. We hope that she and Walt, on the guitar (currently in storage), can become competent enough to collaborate. We had a neighbor in the park, Louise Sackett from Silver City, NM, who was exhibiting at the festival. We also learned that Dahlia (our dog walker) had a winning entry in the youth category. After the show, Louise sold Martha a landscape painting that she had painted for her. We are displaying it in our motorhome.
We spent Saturday, September 25th, resting and relaxing. We have a big tour tomorrow.
We traveled north on Scenic Route 12 to Torrey, UT, on Sunday, September 26th, through the Calf Creek Canyon, across the Hogsback (The road rides along the narrow crest of a ridge no wider than the road itself), through Boulder, UT, and over Boulder Mountain, for a jeep tour of Capitol Reef National Park. We met our guide, Joe, in Torrey and took off in a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. The Rubicon is the off-road version that is specifically designed for mountainous terrain. It turns out that Joe was originally from Athen, TN, just 50 miles from Chattanooga, Walt’s hometown. He was a computer engineering student at Tennessee Tech in Cookville, did consulting work in that field, then decided that he wanted to explore before or instead of engaging in a more traditional career. He guided in Alaska, then spent the past year in Croatia. He had been backpacking in Europe and got sort of stranded by COVID. On returning to the US, he took this guide position with a tour company based in Jackson Hole, WY. Joe was very talkative and knowledgeable about many subjects.
Capitol Reef National Park is a long skinny park, stretching about 100 miles north to south and only about 10 – 20 miles east to west. The defining features of the park are white domes of Navajo Sandstone that resemble capitol building domes and the Waterpocket Fold, a geologic monocline (a wrinkle on the earth), that reminded early travelers of an ocean reef in the middle of the Colorado Basin desert. There are two offroad tour areas in the park, north of highway 24 in the Cathedral Valley and south of highway 24 along the Waterpocket Fold. The roads in the Cathedral Valley had been washed out with the heavy summer monsoon season so we toured south. We drove to the east side of the park on highway 24, then headed south on Notom Road. We were on Forest Service and private land with the National Park just to the west – right hand side as we headed south. We saw rock formations and fossilized seashells (the Oyster Shell Reef), learned about the geology of the Waterpocket Fold and the habit of the creosote bush to poison any plants that attempted to grow nearby, in order to not have to share water. We then turned west on the Burr Trail road that switchbacked up over the Waterpocket Fold. On the top, we drove the Upper Muley/Strike Valley road that was a challenging four wheel drive adventure. We returned to the Burr Trail and drove west through the park and into Red Canyon. In Red Canyon we visited a slot canyon and “chased the sunset” across the rock hills. We ended up in Boulder, UT, between Torrey and Escalante. This was an afternoon tour, starting at 1:00 PM, so there was no urgency of a schedule to maintain. In Boulder was a phenomenal restaurant called the Hell’s Backbone Grill – Hell’s Backbone being the original mountain road from Escalante to Boulder, before the current road thru the Calf Creek Canyon was built by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) in the 1930’s. With Joe we enjoyed the meal in very nice outdoor porch seating. Leaving the restaurant, we then drove north over Boulder Mountain to Torrey, said goodbye to Joe and had to drive back south, over Boulder Mountain again, through Boulder over the Hogsback and through Calf Creek Canyon, all at night. We arrived back in Escalante about 1:00 in the morning. What a tour!
We definitely spent Monday, September 27th, resting and relaxing.