Exploring the Mountain West
Adventures in the State of Utah
Utah has been under a heat wave this summer and it is contributing to our poor drought conditions. But I needed a getaway and have been hankering to get out to the west desert and the House Range in particular. The range is famous for its limestone cliffs and caves, and in particularly for the…
Northern Utah is still socked in with late winter snow so I took another trip down to the San Rafael Swell to take advantage of the high desert weather and lack of snow. Temperatures were in the 20s overnight and up around 40 by day, so I chose to tackle a big hike in the…
I chose Capitol Reef in particular because so much of the park access is from paved and maintained roads. Given this was a early January outing I wanted to make sure that a little snowfall didn’t get in the way. In the end, however, the snow won, and turned me around short of the peak….
The crux of this hike, at least in winter, is the crossing of Dirty Devil River. Normally this is a low-flow river in a predominately sandy watercourse, perhaps knee deep. I planned to hike down the 6 or so miles from Burr Point, then cross the river and hike up through Happy Canyon, returning by…
This one was personal. Two years ago I tried to reach Hondu Arch based on a two-sentence description in an old guidebook, but the route ended up being quite high-risk and I had my two teenage sons along. We turned around before reaching the arch and made our way back down the dangerous south canyon…