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Halls Wagon Road to Halls Crossing, More or Less…

Friday – Sunday, November 1-3, 2024

I started this weekend trip off with two main goals in mind as I headed west into Utah on Friday. The first one was to drive The V Road in the Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument before it’s closed to motorized vehicles in December, and the second one was to finally take a ride on the Charles Hall Ferry across Lake Powell while it’s open and there is still enough water for it to be in operation. Although these two goals might seem like they can’t possibly be connected in any way, there is a historic route which was known as the Halls Wagon Road, Hall Road or Halls Trail, that went from Escalante to Halls Crossing and does kind of tie these two areas together. So even though I never followed any part of the actual Halls Wagon Road on this particular trip, I did roughly parallel the route on modern day roads the entire way. Plus, I have already hiked a couple sections of the historic route including Silver Falls Creek, Muley Twist Canyon and Halls Creek, and I hope to do more sections in the future. I had all of this information on my mind as I left from work on Friday and made my way over to the Escalante River Country near Harris Wash.

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The Grandest of Gulches: Back Into Lower Grand Gulch

Cedar Mesa Chronicles: Chapter 11 | Thursday – Sunday, March 21-24, 2024

This week Diane and I took Thursday and Friday off from work so we could meet up with our friend Jared and spend a couple of days backpacking into lower Grand Gulch within the Bears Ears National Monument. While this would be Diane’s first time hiking into this part of Grand Gulch, Jared and I had hiked here about nine years ago and I was really looking forward to the return visit. From the very start of the hike we could tell there was a lot of water in the canyon from recent storms and that it might have even flash flooded recently, but all that water also created a lot of quicksand and mud in the wash that significantly slowed down our progress and forced us to follow brushy deer trails across the benches in many places. The weather during the first three days of our hike was great and the nights even stayed pretty warm, we only encountered wet weather during our final night in the canyon and during the hike back out of Collins Canyon. Here are some photos taken during our four days in Grand Gulch.

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Lower Grand Gulch

Wednesday – Sunday, April 22-26, 2015

It seems to have become an annual spring tradition for Jared, Dave and myself to plan a backpacking trip in late April or early May to southern Utah in search of ancient ruins and rock art. This year we decided to spend three nights in lower Grand Gulch. I left from work on Wednesday afternoon and drove straight down to Cedar Mesa where I met up with Dave and Jared in our usual camp spot. We sat around the fire to catch up and tentatively worked out some plans for the next few days before getting into our sleeping bags shortly after darkness set in for the night.

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