FENCE CANYON CAMP

After several fierce struggles scrambling through walls of tamarisk while entering or leaving a ford of the Escalante, we were happy to reach the sanctuary of Fence Canyon. A family of 5 were enjoying the pleasures of the river bank. The 3 kids, 2 boys and a 11 or 12 year old girl were plastering each other with mud and water, while their parents relaxed on the bank. We sat down and chatted. They were both teachers from Missoula, Montana, escaping from the spring mud season (obviously there wasn’t enough of it back home for their kids). They had just hiked down from the rim, and at dusk they would hike back up Fence canyon to their car.

Inspiration struck me, and I mentioned how our Toyota Forerunner had been misplaced by our shuttle driver several miles up from the Fence Canyon trailhead. They both exclaimed that they’d be glad to help us out, drive our car back down to the trailhead. Chuck handed over the car keys and we arranged a plan B, in case they couldn’t find the car. In that case, they’d place our keys under the trail register. We talked some more about llamas, tamarisk and water, thanked them, said goodbye and left to find a camp. On the way I joked, “Any bets on whether we’ll find a note at the register saying, ‘So long suckers. Thanks for the Forerunner’.” Chuck didn’t laugh.

We found a little plateau above the river, between the cottonwoods and the local cliff. We dropped our packs, sat down on convenient rocks, and toasted each other with libations of Scotch and Irish whiskey. Close by was an ancient horse tie-up rack, and a cabin platform put there about a century ago by some early Mormon settler, no doubt. The cliff behind it showed what may have been the owner’s barely decipherable scratches. Reed pointed out some other scratches higher up–real Indian petroglyphs with drawings of deer and other animals. Who knows how old those were?

While we were sitting there, a chain of llamas came up to the horse rack and milled around. The owners of the packs the llamas were carrying milled around too, while the llama packer guy fiddled with the packs. Apparently they had been thinking of camping where we were. We sent daggers from our eyes, and they must have penetrated the packer’s brain, because after a few minutes he drove the llama up the canyon a way. The hikers followed docilely to their new camp site.We resumed our whiskey sipping, and watched the opposite canyon turn from brown red to crimson to black as the sun set.

NEON CANYON

The next morning, shortly after the crack of dawn (11 am), we discussed hiking to the nearby Neon Canyon. Hard-man Chuck decided he would rest his weary knee, and let his blister heal a bit that day, right there under the local Cottonwoods. Reed and I bent our heads over the tattered Xerox copy Chuck had made of his guide book to the area. Neon canyon appeared to have something called the Golden Cathedral at its upper end. A picture in the book showed a guy hanging on rappel from a hole in the overhanging cliff, his feet dangling above a little pool that reflected light into the cathedral-like stone. So Reed and I set out with a goal in mind that made our forays into the thickets of tamarisk easier to bear.

Once we got into the Neon side canyon, we were back into the shadows of closely spaced redwalls. Walking along we could see the high redwalls reflected in the little meandering stream and its random pools. At one of the wider parts of the canyon we spotted two charcoal-grey llamas nicely camouflaged behind stands of grey-green brush and cottonwood bark. We figured someone had left them to take care of themselves while they went hiking.

The canyon twisted and turned, and after climbing over boulders, and avoiding gardens of lush poison ivy, we entered the sanctum of the Golden Cathedral. The walls on either side joined, and formed an overhanging dome above us. A couple of big holes in the cavern’s ceiling passed sunbeams down into the pool below. No rappelers dangled there at that moment, but we caught a glimpse of a very narrow slot canyon beyond and above that might be passed by clambering down from the rim. (Later I found a website, that describes a tricky passage down to the cathedral

On the way back home, just before we left the Neon canyon, Reed noticed a trail that went up a series of bushy terraces and seemed to climb to the top of the mesa above us. We climbed up it and found an unparalleled vantage point. We could see up and down the Escalante for miles in either direction. Upstream there was Fence Canyon going beyond a bend on the opposite side of the river. Every meander was bordered at its extreme by a vertical cliff, and a wall of tamarisk on the opposite side. There did seem to be a direct route back to our camp avoiding two fords and much of the tamarisk via an open area cleared, presumably, by the great floods of 2005. Looking back in the direction of Golden Cathedral, we reckoned it would be possible to come down from the rim (and trailhead) to this mesa. That would make a day hike down to Neon a possibility.

We returned to camp and told Chuck what he had missed. We studied some Indian petroglyphs on the walls near our camp, and pondered their meaning. Was this a hunting camp used by the Anasazi hundreds of years ago? That night I took a couple of shots of dazzling Venus using my delayed timer and miniature tripod. The stars in the picture are real, but Venus is highly over-exposed, and looks like a big oval, about like the phase it was in at that time, but enlarged about 10 times.

FENCE CANYON TREK

Next day’s hike up Fence Canyon to the rim was tiring but uneventful. As we trekked upwards, I had my sights on a lower part of the rim that looked accessible, but the trail veered straight towards a very unlikely cliff. As we got higher, the ground became drier and dustier. But in the powderiest, dustiest soil, fields of pinkish-cream desert primroses proliferated. They must have sprouted up in the last couple of days after the rainstorm on our first night. During the final part of the ascent, the trail crossed bare rock with occasional cairns to show the way.In steeper places, there were footholds carved into the stone, by whom, or how long ago, we couldn’t tell. At the final rim a welcome sight appeared–Chuck’s car, which had been delivered safely by our Montana friends.

BARR TRAIL

We drove Colorado-ward via the Barr Canyon trail. This “trail” is a narrow paved road running through a spectacular canyon with high red walls, much like lower Harris, but civilized. Here and there are easily-reached side canyons to explore. One of them, unnamed, was only about 8-10 feet wide and hundreds of feet high. Along the way we passed a turkey fleeing the road–one of the squabblers like we had heard in some of our earlier camps.

As we left the Escalante region via Capitol Ridge and Arches NP, we peered backwards towards Escalante, and discussed our next trip to that rugged desert country. There are a near infinity of great canyons to hike through out there. We’ll be back!

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–rakkity