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Tag: burr trail

Weekend Wandering Along the Waterpocket Fold II

Canyons of the Waterpocket Fold | Burro Wash, Upper Muley Twist & Lower Spring Canyon
President’s Day Weekend | Friday – Sunday, February 18-20, 2022

This weekend I headed out on my annual February trek into Capitol Reef National Park to explore a couple new canyons of the Waterpocket Fold, just like I had done last year. While I usually spend my birthday weekend in Capitol Reef, this year we went to Fremont Indian State Park instead, so I pushed this trip back one week later so that it was over President’s Day Weekend and invited my friend Jared along. As usual, I left right after work on Friday afternoon and made my way through Hanksville to the park. I turned off onto the Notom Road and found a place to camp for the night just after sunset and Jared joined up with me a couple hours later. Truth be told, while waiting for Jared to arrive I fell asleep and then woke up around midnight and saw that his vehicle parked nearby, so I knew he had found me. Then I went back to sleep!

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Upper – Lower Muley Twist Canyon

Canyons of the Waterpocket Fold | Sunday, February 28, 2021

I guess I didn’t get enough of the Waterpocket Fold two weeks ago when I spent my birthday weekend in Capitol Reef National Park, so on Sunday morning I stopped to hike through another canyon carved into the sandstone monocline on my way home since I happened to be driving right past the trailhead along the Burr Trail. After spending Saturday around the King Bench with Dennis and Chris, I left early from camp so I could hike into the upper end of Lower Muley Twist Canyon before driving home. Diane and I had missed this section of the canyon last year since we started at The Post Cutoff Trail to make a loop. I wasn’t expecting this section of the canyon to be as nice as the lower end, and it wasn’t, but it was still much nicer than I thought it was going to be and I ended up taking a lot of photos along the way since the light was nice.

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Across the King Bench: Horse Canyon to The Gulch

Canyons of the Escalante | Friday – Saturday, February 26-27, 2021

This weekend I met up with my friends Dennis and Chris inside of the Circle Cliffs west of the Waterpocket Fold so we could explore a few more Canyons of the Escalante. Over the winter Dennis and I had spoken about getting together for a hike sometime this spring since it had been a while, and he told me about his plans to hike over into The Gulch from Horse Canyon using an old stock trail to get up onto the King Bench. This sounded like a great idea to me, especially since I had never driven the road into Horse Canyon before since it used to be an ‘Administrative Road’ in the Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument, so we made plans to meet up the last weekend of February for the hike.

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Surprise Canyon & Headquarters Canyon

Canyons of the Waterpocket Fold | Southern Utah Wanderings
Friday & Saturday, October 9-10, 2020

While Jared and I had an early dinner in Tropic on Friday evening after hiking through Lower Hackberry Canyon earlier in the day, we discussed our plans for the remainder of the evening and for Saturday. We already knew that Saturday was going to be our last day of the trip since we both needed to get home to get ready for the upcoming week and the following weekend, but we really had no other plans at this point. I suggested that we should head over to the Burr Trail to find a campsite for the night and then we could spend a few hours hiking in Capitol Reef National Park on Saturday morning before heading back home. We decided this sounded like a good plan since it would help cut down some of our drive time back home on Saturday, so after we were done eating we headed in that direction. I guess we would be finishing our week-long trip into Southern Utah at Capitol Reef again, just like last year!

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Waterpocket Fold: Lower Muley Twist Canyon

Friday – Sunday, March 27-29, 2020

This weekend Diane and I headed over to Capitol Reef National Park so we could get in one last backpacking trip before Colorado and Utah were both completely shut down and only open to local residents due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. At this point in time it was still OK to visit and camp within Wayne and Garfield Counties in Utah, plus Capitol Reef National Park was still open, so the trip was a go! We knew that this was probably going to be our last backpacking trip into Utah for a while, so we decided to visit Lower Muley Twist Canyon since it’s a canyon I’ve wanted to explore for a long time and I thought it would be a great place to practice social distancing. It turned out to be a great choice since we would only briefly see one other person the entire weekend, plus the scenery was spectacular!

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