Part 1: The Adventure Begins

Background: Our Coyote Gulch Trip

My daughter Amanda had prepped us for the big Havasupai Falls trip back in 2018 (and Coyote Gulch wasn’t yet even a small part of our planning). Beautiful turquoise falls framed against red rock sandstone and lush greenery on the edge of the Grand Canyon. This sounded like a great adventure! So it was with great anticipation that she and I got online that 2019 February morning to try our internet luck at a first-come ticketpalooza. Within 15 minutes we were beaten down as the site crashed dozens of times and dates evaporated faster than you can say…”wait, what?”. No luck, but thanks for playing….

A year later, we had our poop in a group and fingers were poised at our laptops again. Within 10 minutes I could see we were destined to the internet trash bin once more. With sorrow in my heart I called to console the intrepid adventurer. Twenty minutes later as I was still licking my wounds and complaining to Tammy about our misfortune, Amanda called to let me know she’d scored 6 tickets! Perfect! We made some calls and within a few days had our good friends lined up to go with us. Then….COVID19! Are you kidding me?! The Navajo Nation informed us we could apply for 2021 and transfer our tickets so that is what we did, but as many might know, we are still dealing with COVID. The Nation couldn’t open again in early 2021.

Plan B – Escalante and Coyote Gulch

We knew the Havasupai trip was still at risk due to COVID, so Amanda built an itinerary for both Plan A and Plan B. Enter Plan B: She would start her adventure in the area around Escalante, then move the party to Bryce Canyon, and save the grand finale for Zion. Now, Tammy and I didn’t have 9 days burning a hole in our pocket, so we’d have to choose where in the itinerary to start. Since we’d spent some time in Zion and a lesser pass through Bryce, we chose to focus on the Escalante portion of the trip. As they say in hindsight….”Good trade”.

Amanda’s plan was to hit some of the following areas:

• Peekaboo and Spooky slot canyons
• Coyote Gulch
• Zebra slot and Bighorn canyons
• Kodachrome Gulch
• Petrified forest
• Bryce’s Navajo/Queen’s Garden Loop
• Fairyland Loop
• Zion’s overlook, Angel’s landing, the Narrows, and Kolob Canyons

Check out my posts on Peekaboo/Spooky and the two Bryce later this month!

Research Our Path and Trip

Youtube is a lot of things, but when it comes to researching outdoor adventures, it happens to be a gold mine. So many folks post their experiences there and we are able to learn from their guidance and mistakes. Tammy and I started consuming videos…lots of videos. It became quickly apparent that Coyote Gulch would be the most epic of the trials (yeah, that isn’t a typo for trails). We had options to enter and exit Coyote Gulch. From the west, there are three options: 1) Red Well trail, 2) Hurricane Wash trail, and 3) the Jacob Hamblin “sneaker” route. From the east, there is really only “Crack-in-the-Wall”, an ominous sounding (and in real life) route in or out of the canyon in your own personal mini-slot canyon to guide you off the cliff.  

Much of the guts of Coyote Gulch are between Jacob Hamblin and Crack’, with the Hurricane and Red Well trails adding a lot of mileage without quite as much “stuff”, pound-for-pound. The catch was that the Sneaker route requires you to use ropes. No rappelling harness is needed, but you darned sure should have a rope. Crack in the wall looks scary at first, but the more videos we watched, the less concerned we became. I guess that is a net neutral youtube experience…we wouldn’t have been scared without watching the Youtube videos, but the more we watched, the less scared we got. Amanda didn’t watch any videos and was at the same negligible scare factor. Oh well.

Last Minute Preparations

When I informed the ranger of my intentions, he said “You know, you are doing this the hardest way?” Unfortunately, he was on speakerphone in the truck and Tammy heard that too. Crap! Well, we couldn’t really back out now, since I had the route loaded into my watch, right? We met Amanda and her pal Sydney in Escalante the morning before our hike and the excitement at the table was palpable. Since it was only a 13-mile hike, we didn’t get too worried about our normal early start. We elected to eat, hit the visitor’s center to make sure we got our free permit (they have them at the trail heads, but there is a risk of them being empty), and head out to Peekabo and Spooky, a story for another time.

Leaving Peekabo and Spooky early in the afternoon, the already washboard road became epic. My nerves frazzled and Amanda had to fight her bikes on the bike rack. In hindsight, we should have broken them down and found a home inside the trucks for them or found a way to leave them in Escalante. Anyone looking for an entrepreneurial idea might think about short-term bike storage in Escalante!! One cool thing the visitor center ranger told me was the road between 40-mile water tank and the Crack-in-the-Wall trailhead was good. From Youtube I gathered the sand would swallow any non 6-wheel drive positrack-sand rail….we had intended to leave both trucks at the 40-mile trailhead, but as we prepared packs, Tammy notices people coming and going at-will in…Subarus and F150s!! So our 13 mile hike could now become 11 miles if we’d leave a truck at each trailhead!

On the Trail : Crack in the Wall

Sand. Lots of sand. I’ve never seen so much sand. It grabs your feet, fills your shoes, and rips into your poor straining calves and quads. When we hit a patch of rock wandering across the desert toward Crack-in-the-Wall it felt like someone pushed you in your back out of the sand. Sort of like getting on and off those speeding walkways at the airport. Crazy experience, really. We plodded a little over two miles, mostly downhill, in the sand to Crack’. The rock cairns (Amanda and Sydney called them “Karens” for whatever reason) led the way and they must have been right since my watch wasn’t arguing. When we reached Crack in the Wall, we were so grateful we’d watched the videos! My daughter wouldn’t watch videos because she didn’t want to spoil the surprise, but I was glad as hell not to be surprised.

Crack in the Wall are a pair of slabs that have (barely) fallen away from a 40-foot sheer cliff. There is just enough space in each of the two cracks for a person to scrape their butt and their chest along in a shimmy that lasts for a few dozen feet each. Between them is a small ledge and a rockpile perched over a cliff you have to climb up to get into the second crack. Both require you to climb down to the bottom of the crack. It all sounds more dramatic than it actually was, but I did get a wicked rope burn from my first attempt at lowering a heavy pack. Packs had to be lowered to the top of the first slab and then from there to the sandy trail below. Grooves are present in the rock where ropes have cut into them over the years.

Getting into Coyote Gulch.

We left Crack’ and slogged downhill through deep sand to a beautiful basin where Coyote Gulch joins the Escalante River. Stevens Arch (4^th biggest in the world) looms in every photo you take in this epic sandstone basin and the formations take your breath away…truly. As we entered the gulch in the evening light, we quickly ran into a couple of camps along Coyote Gulch. We said howdy and kept on motoring upstream toward Jacob Hamblin. Almost immediately we ran into the creek and whipped out our trusty water shoes. Zig-zagging up the creek and through the creek, we trudged out what we’d later find out was about a mile and a half.

We ran into one difficult passage of a waterfall where the ledges around it angle too steeply to keep your boots from slipping. I was able to shoulder-to-derrier boost the girls up onto the ledge and brace their first step with my hands to allow them to get to safer rock. However, when it was my turn, there was no booster available. I had to find a tree and brace myself against it and the rock and shimmy up until I could get on the ledge. This was great, but I couldn’t cross the sloped rock between me and the girls, so Amanda packed two packs while I (packless) scrambled up the canyon talus and around the cliffs. Lucky for us, camp was only a few hundred yards above the falls!

At this point we were just hunting for a place to pitch tents. We were smoked, and I was dragging badly. As sun set, we became a little more “interested” in finding a campsite! As luck would have it, timing was perfect and camp was quickly set…in the sand!

Part 2 continues the story!!