I sat in my truck, and through the open passenger window, took photo after photo as this blue heron stood motionless. I changed lenses, snapped a few more, and then I turned off my camera and laid it in on the seat. At that moment, the heron plucked a fish from the pond, looked at me, winked, and then flapped those wings like bed sheets and flew away.

When Champagne’s roofed Adam’s house, the crew consisted of Americans in their twenties, but the men who arrived at my house all look like they come from south of our border. I worried that they weren’t legal and that they’d rather I not photograph their faces, but for the sake of the blog, and to update Matt on what’s happening to his house, not to mention the opportunity to record another deep blue New England sky, I snapped away.

It’s funny how small my house looks with six guys swarming over it. By 10 AM the entire roof was stripped, and by the end of the day they’d finished laying maybe three quarters of the roof.

Saturday, April 21

In the little town of Escalante, we found out where our contracted shuttle driver was located–the Outfitter/bar/tee-shirt-shop/pizza joint–and made final arrangements. He would lead us to 25-Mile Wash where we’d drop our car, and drive us to the trailhead at Harris Wash. Then we’d hike down Harris toward the Escalante River, down the river, and then up 25-Mile Wash to our truck. A jaunt of about 35 miles that we could easily (?) do in 6 days.

We scarfed down our last good pre-hike food (pizza) at the Outfitter, and followed the Shuttle guy’s truck down the gravel Hole-In-The-Rock road toward 25-Mile and Harris. We left our truck at the site he designated, and then rode with him to our trekking-off site.

Hiking down the Harris Wash trail, Chuck and I were contemplating the view, but Reed was fiddling with his new GPS. He had (luckily, as it turned out) set a “Waypoint” on the GPS at the location where our shuttle driver had left our truck, and then set another one at the Harris Wash trailhead, but he couldn’t figure out how to extract the coordinates to compare with our topo maps. Finally at a rest stop he worked out where the trailhead was, and after some puttering around we decided, that our shoulders testified to many eastward miles, we hadn’t even reached the west edge of our topo.

The clouds loomed dark and thick in all directions. We were uncormfortably aware that the weather man had predicted rain for tomorrow and Monday, so we hoped to reach camp and put up shelter, just in case the rains came early.

After a multi-mile trudge through heavy thickets of tamarisk–an illegal immigrant from Siberia that chokes the shores of most western streams–we finally arrived at the entrance to the Glen Canyon Recreation Area, and, coincidentally, the west edge of our topo map. Now we were in “known” territory. At another rest stop, Reed finally figured out how to get the coordinates of the GPS Waypoints, and he informed us where the car was. Unfortunately, our shuttler had parked us at a point in 25-mile Wash all right, but about 5 miles upstream from where we expected to be. So it looked like we’d have some extra hiking to do on the last day of the trip.

After entering the GC Rec Area, the canyon walls rose higher, the canyon narrowed, and the stream started meandering. The views were prettier, but we had to make many more stream crossings. Chuck had river shoes, but Reed and I, if we wanted to keep some dry boots, had to alternate between Crocs and boots. After the 5th or 6th crossing, I said, “The heck with staying dry”, and just walked into the creek at every ford with my big boots on. Comfort-wise, the wetness made no difference, I was surprised to find.

About the time the sun was settling behind the canyon walls, we reached a nice camp site and set up the 2-man and 1-man tents. We hung up our boots and clothes to dry in the warm desert breeze, and cooked up a well-deserved freeze-dried dinner using our handy butane stoves. The next day, we hoped, we’d toddle up, sans backpacks, to Silver Creek Falls in a side-canyon of that name on the other side of the Escalante river.

Photo Album

Next: The Escalante and Silver Falls Creek Canyon

-rakkity

Travis is doing his best to keep me current. It’s a lost cause.