Rachel Grindlay

Continued from Part 3

I was keen to drive the “Million Dollar Highway” while it was dry so we made sure we got an early start. The highway was a treat with many Aspens turning to their fall colours. We stopped a few times to take in the views.

From Molas Pass we did a few kilometres of the Colorado Trail to Little Molas Lake and then part way up the Twin Sisters Trail section. We hadn’t intended to go far and so hadn’t taken anything (e.g. raincoats) with us. However, we’d kept walking – just to get to ‘that’ spot, or that next view, and next thing we knew we’d were over an hour from the car and the weather had packed it in and was snowing on us. Dropping down a few contours back into the trees got us to drier climes and we got back to the car without getting drenched!

We also got lucky as shortly after we’d stopped for lunch at James Ranch, a massive hailstorm came through. There were piles of hail all over the yard. We were lucky to be ensconced in the dining room eating burgers and not on the road. With the weather as it was we were very glad to be staying with Rachel who we’d met at Poison Springs the previous weekend. At our trip halfway point it was great to be staying in a home, with the opportunity to get some washing done.

We got away relatively early the next morning heading to Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde is famous for cliff dwellings that the Ancestral Pueblo people occupied until around 1200AD. We were booked on a guided tour to Balcony House – involving ladders and crawling through narrow access points. The cliff dwellings are very impressive and the thought of trying to access them without modern ladders makes the mind boggle.

We hadn’t appreciated how much there was to see at Mesa Verde, and also how much driving was involved. Despite getting to the park at 10am we didn’t make it back to the campground much before sunset – to think we’d originally had ideas of then pushing on to somewhere else (mainly because the campground is extortionately priced).

The drive to Page the next day was one of our longer driving days. It was brought to us by songs beginning with I, J, and K. When Tom had been connecting his phone up to the car he’d had some difficulty getting his music to play. When it finally did start working it was playing his collection in alphabetical order – not daring to touch it in case it broke, that was how it stayed for the whole trip. Perhaps unsurprisingly there are a lot of songs beginning with I.

Things on the schedule were a bit vague from here as we were constrained by the dates of our Buckskin Gulch permit and how to work other activities around it. In retrospect the order we did things was likely inefficient, but at the time it seemed sensible. After finding a delightful green-grass covered park in Page for lunch, we headed out to the Paria Contact Station to pick up our permits and WAG bags (more on this later!) for Buckskin Gulch two days later. While there we checked out the White House Trailhead and decided to secure a campsite for the night. Catstair Canyon was just a few minutes up the road, so that was the next stop.

Catstair Canyon has a unique feature of many old cars stacked up, presumably as surety for the wall of the road? Otherwise it’s a pretty brief canyon ending at a petroglyph wall. A good way to stretch out the legs after a long morning in the car though! And another opportunity for me to meat-anchor Tom/him to partner-assist me down.

I had thought we’d do something else but it was a very hot afternoon, and the other canyons on our hit list weren’t particularly close. Instead we settled for the shade, behind the car, back at the campsite. Though later that afternoon I used my spare pair of gloves to clear the tumbleweed (yes, literally, aka Russian Thistle) which had taken over the marked tent area of our campsite.

The next morning we set off for Blue Pool Wash, another canyon that was very close to Highway 89, and also contained random car parts in it. We hadn’t dressed for down-climbing (my poor bare knees) so we made things a bit trickier than they should have been. However, a good canyon, and well worth the stop.

From there we stopped in Page for Tom to check out the Glen Canyon Dam while I tried to book us some accom for the night. We’d agreed it would be better to stay in a motel so that we didn’t have to pack our gear up for our 7:30am shuttle pickup. Unfortunately, unlike earlier in the trip where leaving bookings to the last minute had resulted in cheap prices, the opposite occurred in Page. In the half hour I was searching the prices increased, agh! I ended up booking a motel I’d looked at the previous day but at a 50% higher price.

With logistics sorted we had a long drive around to the Lees Ferry Road. Tom was enamoured with abseiling to the Colorado River, even if it was a pretty contrived route. We set out for 2.8 Mile Wash in sweltering temperatures in the early afternoon – no relief was provided in the wash as it was very wide.

Tom, in particular, then had a long time in the sun as he very carefully set up a retrievable anchor for the 50m abseil to the Colorado. Our pull cord was only 35m so we’d tied our handline on to it and hoped that would make it long enough – we’d only know once I’d got to the bottom.

Fortunately, the handline/pull cord combo was long enough, so that meant we could use the retrievable anchor and not need to leave a sling behind. Nothing like using a fiddlestick for the first time in the field, with just the two of us, on a 50m drop! The moment of truth – the pull – and it came away perfectly.

It was a relief to get down next to the Colorado with some breeze in the shade. It wasn’t long before we made it to Cathedral Wash (which is normally done as an out and back) and proceeded to scramble our way back up and cross-country to the car. Despite being somewhat less enthused for this outing compared to Tom, having done it I can see the attraction, particularly for out-of-towners.

Tom had wanted to go to Horseshoe Bend for sunset but that just made logistics difficult so he conceded and we paid our $10 parking fee and went in the late afternoon. We seemed to have hit a slightly less busy period – most people had headed off to start winding down for the day, and the sunset crowd hadn’t yet arrived. By the time we left new tides of people were arriving by the minute. Despite the crowds it is a very impressive view, and there are plenty of vantage points along the clifflines.

Finally, not long before sunset, we made it to our motel. As it turned out our expensive room meant we had a seat out the back with extensive views over the desert as the sun set – lovely. If you could ignore the odd dude who was digging in the gravel of the car park until it got dark. Packing for our only overnight walk (canyon) of the trip – not so much fun, but as we’d ended up with a two-roomed apartment we had plenty of room to explode our gear everywhere.

Continue to Part 5