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The White Rim to Monument Basin

Friday – Sunday, February 4-6, 2022

For the past two years I have spent the first weekend in February exploring the White Rim in Canyonlands National Park. You can find those two Trip Reports here: White Crack Trail to The Confluence & Airport Tower to Monument Basin. I’ve had good weather and great views on each of those trips so I decided to do it one more time this year and grabbed a camping permit for Gooseberry and Airport back in November before the prices of backcountry permits were raised, so this was going to be my last trip at the old price. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring from the White Rim Trail over the years and am actually running out of places I want to check out, but one place I’ve really wanted to hike down to for a long time is Monument Basin, so I figured this trip would be the perfect opportunity to finally give it a try. I knew Jared would be very interested in this hike, so I made sure to invite him along, too.

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The Intrepid Trails at Dead Horse Point State Park

Saturday & Sunday, December 5-6, 2020

Since Diane and I both got new mountain bikes within the past couple of months and I am actually enjoying riding the new bike I got so far, I thought it would be fun to reserve a yurt at Dead Horse Point State Park for the weekend so we could check out the Intrepid Mountain Bike Trails since they are supposed to be on the easy side and we are still both pretty new to this. Also, since we enjoyed our stay in a yurt at Goblin Valley State Park last winter, I was interested in doing it again and spending more quality time exploring another of Utah’s State Parks since all of my previous visits to Dead Horse Point have been quick visits at sunrise for photos. When I booked the yurt back in October I knew that I was taking a chance on the weather, especially since we wanted to mountain bike. In early December there could be a foot of snow from a recent winter storm up here, or it could be beautiful sunny weather in the 50’s during the day. Thankfully we got lucky this weekend and had pretty great conditions for this time of the year. The highs were in the upper 40’s with a lot of sunshine and the lows were only in the low 30’s, which was even warmer than our Thanksgiving trip to Cedar Mesa last weekend. Of course, the lows at night didn’t really matter much to us since we were staying in a heated yurt.

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Roads That Don’t End and Views That Never Cease

Diane’s Birthday Ride on the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park
Saturday – Monday, October 17-19, 2020

Earlier this year Diane told me that she wanted to mountain bike the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park for her birthday in October. I told her I would try to make it happen, but that it would depend if I could get permits or not since they can be hard to get for that time of the year. Although I really have no desire to bike the White Rim Trail myself, I knew that I would be perfectly happy to carry all of the gear in my Jeep for the trip as it’s been a while since I drove around the entire White Rim. Earlier this year and late last year I had driven in part of the way from both ends of the White Rim Road, but the last time I drove the entire route was to celebrate Canyonlands 50th Birthday in 2014, so I was looking forward to getting back out and doing it again. This trip would also be a good opportunity for me to take it slow and make this a nice easy and relaxing trip where I could stop and go on a few obscure hikes along the way.

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West Side Wandering: Fingers of Salt Creek Canyon

Thursday – Sunday, March 12-15, 2020

This year for our annual early season backpacking trip to The Needles we returned to one of my favorite places on the Colorado Plateau- Salt Creek Canyon. Although I have spent a lot of time in this canyon over the years, Diane had never been here before, so I was looking forward to showing her around on her first visit and searching for new traces of the ancient ones that called this canyon home. Instead of it being just the two of us, this time we also invited our friend Jerry along since I know he’s always up for a nice walk through Salt Creek Canyon. We planned to meet up with him on Friday morning at the Visitor Center since I had to stop there to pick up the permit that I had reserved online four months in advance.

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The Search for the Sky Faces

Friday & Saturday, December 1-2, 2017

A few years back I came across an old photo of some pictographs I was unfamiliar with called the Sky Faces. Since I’ve enjoyed visiting many of the other ‘Faces Motif’ pictographs in the Canyonlands region (Four Faces, Five Faces, Thirteen Faces, etc.), I decided to try and track them down. It took me a few years, but I was finally able to figure out their location earlier this year and wanted to try and get to them before the year was over. Back in October Jared and I tried to hike to them, but we were unable to reach them via the route we took. With warmer weather sticking around this weekend I decided to head down to Canyonlands National Park after work on Friday and go on a long hike to reach the pictographs on Saturday. I ended up spending Friday night just outside the park in Bears Ears National Monument, which may have been the last time? Looking at the new maps of the Monument, I guess I would have been camped in what is now going to be the Indian Creek National Monument.