Southern Utah Wanderings 2010 | Day 3
Monday, October 4, 2010
OK, before I get started on Monday’s trip report, it appears that my memory may be incorrect and I jumped the gun on Sunday’s trip report. Jared has informed me that it was the night before Monday that we had the vehicle driving down the Hole-in-the-Rock Road that woke us up with it’s constant buzzing sounds. So instead of fixing the previous report, I’m just going to insert this correction here. Now onto Monday!
Monday morning we woke up to rain. We had a quick breakfast inside the Jeep to stay dry. The sky to the south looked clear, so we headed in that direction to hike down Willow Gulch to Broken Bow Arch. When we arrived at the Willow Gulch trailhead we got lucky and the sky was indeed clear here with the sun shining….so we grabbed our backpacks and headed down canyon.
Mortar Board Rock
View into Willow Gulch as we descended
A short ways down Willow Gulch we headed up a side canyon and found some petroglyphs.
There were quite a few petroglyphs, but most of them were fading away pretty good. After taking some photos we continued on to Broken Bow Arch which required some bushwhacking along the creek.
Broken Bow Arch was pretty impressive when we reached it
We spent some time around the arch and then started heading back. A few photos from along the way…
When we reached the Jeep the weather was still holding out so we headed up the Sooner Slide onto Fiftymile Bench to try and spot some ruins from the road. We were able to find both ruin sites, but they were both too high for us to try and climb to.
Spot the ruins (look for the square door)
Another ruin on Fiftymile Mountain
Unfortunately, while we were up on Fiftymile Bench the clouds rolled in opened up. It rained pretty good on us. We were hoping to head down the Willow Tank Slide but the road on that side was way too saturated and the mud/clay had no traction. We headed back over to the Sooner Slide and luckily I was able to drive down slowly and carefully. We made it back to camp where it would pretty much rain all night and into the morning.
Tuesday, to be continued…