It felt a bit unnatural to wake up in the Whispering Sands Motel in hotrock Hanksville, Utah after several nights of camping out under the stars, but eating a tasty breakfast at the local favorite Blondies was our compensation. The young Mormons kids running the place were super friendly and Jimmy and I enjoyed our power breakfast on the front porch overlooking a steady stream of pickup trucks hauling boats to Lake Powell for the end of summer Labor Day weekend. By now, we had been on the road so long that we had lost all track of time and didn’t even know what day it was. We were totally mystified by the large volume of watercraft passing by until our waitress explained what the hell was going on.
Before heading over to Goblin Valley, we stopped at Hollow Mountain for some gas, snacks, and water. The store was carved out of the inside of a brown sandstone hill and it was like walking into a big cave. They sell a little bit of everything, including an excellent assortment of Michael Kelsey guide books, which I was amazed to discover are now in their fifth printing. His original book “Canyon Hiking Guide to the COLORADO PLATEAU” was my hiking bible for many years. My, how time flies when you’re having fun.
LITTLE WILDHORSE CANYON
Goblin Valley is located in a state park and on BLM land. The state park is noted for its hoodoos and weird balanced-rock formations and is extremely popular with the people of Utah who come from far and wide to play amidst the odd assortment of rock formations.
Goblin Valley was in the news last year when some yuckapuck decided to push one of the precariously perched rocks off its base. And rather than own it, and just admit that he was an idiot, he claimed that he was performing a public service by knocking over the rock before it fell on some unsuspecting hiker. The authorities didn’t buy his story and he went to jail and was subsequently convicted of being an asshole.
Our destination was on BLM land in a place called Little Wildhorse Canyon where we would be hiking through what is arguably the coolest slot canyon in the Southwest that is easily accessible without ropes.
We didn’t get on the trail until noon, so it was already cooking. The first half-mile of the hike was along a wide open dry wash with the occasional cottonwood tree providing some much-needed shade. The temperature was already pushing 100 degrees.
When the canyon started to tighten up we avoided the first narrow section which I remembered from past hikes was a dead end that turned into a slimy red mud bog ending in a slippery rock wall. I spotted a well worn trail to the left that led up onto a sandstone ledge. We followed the ledge for a few hundred feet until it dropped back down into the narrow canyon beyond the mud trap.
We were now at the intersection of Bell Canyon and Little Wild Horse Canyon. There was a very hard-to-see directional sign post on the sand bench in front of us, indicating that we should take the canyon on the right. Bell was the larger canyon to the left.
Once we entered Little Wildhorse the narrows began almost immediately and ran pretty much continuously for the next two miles. It was slow going but there was nothing too difficult or challenging. We just took our time and stopped frequently to take in the amazing spectacle of one of the Southwest’s premier slot canyons.
The first time I had hiked the isolated canyon, back in the early eighties, I had the place completely to myself. Little Wild Horse had yet to be discovered. But now it’s on everybody’s bucket list, and this was a holiday weekend, so there were lots of hikers – mostly smiling Mormon families with small children. And given how narrow the trail was, we had to stop periodically to let people coming back down the canyon pass by because there wasn’t enough room for more than one person at a time.
You are probably wondering: What’s the difference between a slot canyon and a narrows? Well, as we would learn the following evening during the evening ranger talk entitled “Slot Canyons” in the lovely moon-lit Amphitheater at Capitol Reef National Park, the terms are not interchangeable.
Ranger Adam explained how he had tried to research the topic and “hit a wall” because there really was no standard definition for the term. So, Adam started asking his canyoneer friends for their definition and they collectively narrowed it down to this: a slot canyon is where you can touch both canyon walls with your arms. Narrows can only be called slot canyons if they are really narrow. Jimmy and I came up with another defining factor for slot canyons: if you are in a slot canyon when a flash flood comes barreling through, you’re toast; whereas in a narrows, you might be able to find some high ground.
As an example, the photo above is of Jimmy standing in the Little Wildhorse slot canyon. While the photo below is of me posing casually in Capitol Gorge narrows, where we would hike the next day, and it’s pretty narrow, but it’s still too wide to be called a slot canyon.
The Wingate and Navajo Sandstone geologic formations are where you will find a slot canyon. Nobody has any idea how many slot canyons there are in the Colorado Plateau, but there are more than in any place else on earth.
Little Wildhorse is so narrow that in some places the walls of the canyon come together and there is no ground to stand on. So, we had to walk sideways on the canyon walls. The smooth rock faces were polished and fluted like magnificent sculptures that would put any man-made piece of art to shame. The scale was immense and the colors psychedelic. It was like hiking on acid.
At the two mile mark the canyon opened up for a quarter mile and then came to a large stagnant pool. This was as far as we were going. We could have taken the canyon a few more miles to where it intersected the Bell Canyon, and then hiked back to where we started. But I knew from past experience that once the narrows ended, the rest of the trail was wide open and would be dangerously hot. So, we stopped at the end of the narrow section and drank some water and relaxed in the shade with a happy family from Salt Lake City on vacation.
We started back down the canyon at about three and took our time. We were in no hurry. By now, most people had finished their hike, so the canyon was a lot less busy and the silence was refreshing. But the hike back is never as fun as going up because there is no sense of exploration. But novelty is a relative term in a place like Little Wildhorse, and we kept stopping to prolong our visit because we didn’t want to break the spell. (4 miles – 3 hrs)
The drive back to UT 24 was enchanting as the late afternoon cathedral light spread across Goblin Valley. There were many small encampments in the shadows of the pinnacle buttes as holiday vacationers basked in the fading glory of summer’s end.
Back in Hanksville, we turned west on UT 24 and settled into one of my favorite drives through the Fremont River Valley, the San Rafael Swell, and the Caineville Mesas. It is a starkly beautiful land of brown-stained and red-streaked battleship mesas and irrigated farmlands.
Jimmy and I were rolling the dice because the only place to eat between Hanksville and our campsite in the Bentonite Baldlands was a hippie/cosmic outpost called the Luna Mesa Cafe. Back in the eighties I had often stopped there on my way through the area to grab a beer and take in the goofy interior that was papered in money from all around the world. But it had been many years since my last visit, and this was the sort of place, like the Fry Canyon Lodge, that could have a very short shelf life given the small number of local inhabitants and the marginal touron traffic passing through the area. Plus, it looked a little weird, starting with the name. So, it was anybody’s guess whether they were still in business.
As luck would have it, Luna Mesa was still going strong, though under fresh management. A young couple, Dan and Cher, along with their new baby girl, welcomed us with open arms. We were the only diners that evening. We ordered off the Mexican menu and were pleasantly surprised. It was simple food, but delicious and clearly made with love. It was like dining in someone’s funky kitchen and it turned out to definitely be a “Best of the Southwest” kind of stop.
THE OLD NOTOM ROAD
About 2.5 miles east of the park is the Old Notom Road (green street sign 2780 East) in the dream-like Bentonite Badlands which are layered with linear bands of maroon, grey, yellow, and white and littered with large volcanic boulders of black basalt. Technically, it’s a part of the San Rafael Swell and the gateway to the Burr Trail, the Henry Mountains, and the eastern edge of the Waterpocket Fold.
Notom was originally settled in 1883 and in its heyday it was home to 23 Mormon ranching and farming families. About all you will find there today is a very nice B&B with a stunning view of Mt. Ellen the highest peak (11,500′) in the Henry Mountains.
We set up our lawn chairs and laid out our bedrolls as the sky lights ascended and the silence enveloped us like a cloud of delight. Around eleven, we took a moonlight walk across a landscape that resembled another planet that literally glowed. It had been yet another wondrous day and as we lay in our sleeping bags staring up at the shining sky the shooting stars just kept on coming. It was the stuff of dreams.
Next Stop – Capitol Reef