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Hole-In-The-Rock Road to Sooner Rocks

Canyons of the Escalante | Wednesday, October 14, 2026

While there was a small chance for rain in the forecast overnight, Jared and I didn’t think it would amount to very much and we planned to head down the Hole-in-the-Rock (HITR) Road first thing in the morning. Boy, was that forecast way off! It ended up raining pretty heavily for much of the night which made us reconsider those plans since the HITR Road would be thoroughly soaked. Instead, we returned to Escalante for breakfast and waited around for a little while to give the road a chance to start drying out. Eventually we decided to drive down to the Devils Garden to see what shape the road was in and then we wandered around the hoodoos for the second time this week to kill even more time.

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Sandstone Sojourn: Ladder Canyon & Milagro Passage

Canyons of the Escalante | Tuesday, October 13, 2026

We woke up on Tuesday morning with high hopes of driving down towards the far end of the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, but then we checked the latest weather forecast and saw that there was yet another full day of rain in store for us, so we made the reluctant decision to stay closer to town for one more day. All this rain was really beginning to put a damper on our trip and I was getting anxious to get back to our regularly scheduled program! The weather for the rest of the week was looking dry, so we were pretty sure that we would be heading out first thing on Wednesday morning. Until then we needed to find another hike for today. We wanted to do something a little longer this time, so we went on another sandstone sojourn- this time from the end of the Old Sheffield Road to the Escalante River following the rim of Spencer Canyon to Ladder Canyon. Then we were thinking about hiking up and through the Milagro Passage, depending on how our legs were feeling by then…

Avoiding Rain Around the Canyons of the Escalante

Canyons of the Escalante | Saturday – Monday, October 10-12, 2026

After spending most of the day exploring the interesting sandstone of Concretion Wash on Saturday, the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel finally arrived and the weather forecast was calling for quite a bit of rain to fall across the landscape over the next few days. We decided that it would probably not be a good idea to drive out to the end of the Hole-in-the-Rock Road until the storm passed, so now we would need to spend the next few days trying to avoid the rain by finding shorter hikes that are closer to good all-weather roads and not located in narrow canyons where flash-flooding is possible. Over the course of the next two days we would stay closer to town and hike a few new trails and routes while also revisiting some places that we hadn’t been back to in quite some time.

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Sandstone Sojourn: Concretion Wash to the Zebra Slot

Sandstone Sojourn: Concretion Wash to Zebra Slot

Sandstone Sojourn: Concretion Wash to the Zebra Slot

Canyons of the Escalante | Friday – Saturday, October 9-10, 2026

Aside from a brief visit in November of 2024 so I could drive The V Road before it was supposed to be closed by the BLM, I have been wanting to get back to the Canyons of the Escalante since 2022 when that year’s trip with Jared was cut short after I got sick and headed home early. I finally made plans to go back last October, but then Diane’s brain surgery prevented me from going on our annual Southern Utah Wanderings trip for the first time in 14 years, and even though we tried to squeeze in an abbreviated trip later in the year a few times, we were never able to pull it off. After all of these delays, I suppose you could say I was very anxious to get back this year and had been looking forward to this trip for quite some time. Unfortunately, our timing couldn’t have been worse since we would be arriving at about the same time that the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel would also be getting to the area which meant we would need to change our plans to work around the excessive rainfall and stay out of narrow canyons to avoid possible flash flooding.

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Canyons of the Escalante: Big Horn Canyon

Southern Utah Wanderings in a Sandstone Wilderness
Wednesday, October 2, 2019

After our long day hike on the Boulder Mail Trail on Tuesday, we decided to try to take things a little easier today. Kind of like a rest day. Of course, as we have found out over the years, Jared and I are not very good at taking rest days. We tell ourselves that we are only going to hike a couple of miles, but then we end up hiking over ten! We slept in a little later this morning and planned to head into Escalante for a hearty breakfast before our hike. Unfortunately, every place in town that serves breakfast was closed for some reason this morning and we ended up at Subway. Not really the hearty breakfast I had envisioned. Next we headed back to the Old Sheffield Road so we could hike a loop through Big Horn Canyon from the top. The funny thing is that when I was planning our hikes this week I thought that this canyon is where we would find the most solitude, but in reality we crossed paths with more people at the lower end of Big Horn Canyon than we would see on all our other hikes this week combined. I had no idea that this was such a popular place!

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Tag: alvey wash

Hole-In-The-Rock Road to Sooner Rocks

Sandstone Sojourn: Ladder Canyon & Milagro Passage

Avoiding Rain Around the Canyons of the Escalante

Sandstone Sojourn: Concretion Wash to the Zebra Slot

Canyons of the Escalante: Big Horn Canyon