Regular readers may recall that Telejon and I paddled 103 miles of the Green River in the eastern Utah desert in October. Well, Jon and I had such a good time last October that we re-did the first half of that trip, through Labyrinth Canyon for 45 river miles from Ruby Ranch to Mineral Bottom, over a three-day weekend that ended on Monday.
Once again we used Tag-A-Long Expeditions as a shuttle. We overnighted Friday night in Moab thanks to AmyZ's nearly one million Hilton Honors points, then Chris from Tag-A-Long drove us to the put-in at Ruby Ranch, south of the town of Green River on Saturday morning.
It was hot, hot, hot all weekend, with high temps nearing 100ºF each day. We crafted a kayaker's swamp cooler by frequently dipping our hats and shirts into the silty river water. Jon would supplement that with an absorbent bead-filled sleeve that he would soak before draping it around his neck.
It's nothing but high, arid desert at the put-in, its tan and yellow soil and rock punctuated only by the greenery of Ruby Ranch's irrigated alfalfa operation and the omnipresent tamarisk, an invasive species of tree that creates a nearly impenetrable barrier long the water's edge. It isn't long, however, before the grand cliff walls begin to rise above the shoreline as the river starts to carve its course down into, and eventually through the plateau. For the entire distance to Mineral Bottom, only a handful of ATV trails reach the river's edge from the plateau above.
Large fish would occasionally jump from the water right next to our boat hulls as we paddled for the first seven miles to Tri-Canyon, where we pulled out for lunch. At Tri-Canyon you can paddle a kayak a couple of hundred feet up the narrow, twisting course of the wash before running out of water at what's known as the upper camp. It's too tight to get even a small raft up there, and I suspect too shallow to navigate with a canoe, either, but the roughly three-inch draft of a touring kayak is perfect for spots like this. Situated on a flat, sandy shelf tucked right against the sheer overhanging wall on the north side of the wash, the upper camp affords a bit of welcome shade even at mid-day.
There was one other river party from Colorado at Tri-Canyon spending their second day in a row at the lower camp, situated on the sandy bluff at the entrance to Tri-Canyon. Led by a father who in his youth guided trips down the Green for Colorado Outward Bound, they were doing a leisurely family trip down to Mineral Bottom over eight days with three oar rafts. As we ate lunch we could hear their kids laughing and screaming. When we exited the wash after lunch we immediately saw why.
Besides these three families traveling as one group, on Day 1 we'd see two people and a dog floating on an oar raft, and one family in a jet boat. No one else, although a number of great blue herons would stand silently as a sentinel along the river's edge before taking flight when we got too close for their comfort.
We made a remarkable 21 miles that day, barely skirting to the south of an intense thunderstorm that delivered little more for us than some ferocious microburst upstream winds that immediately created an 18- to 24-inch chop against the river current. Our kayaks, though -- mine a Necky Looksha, and Jon's a rented Wilderness Experience Tsunami 14.5 -- easily muscled through. We could see in the distance numerous cloud-to-ground lightning bolts and sheets of pouring rain falling somewhere in the vicinity of Ruby Ranch. We pulled off the river for the day at Hey Joe Canyon, pitched camp and then explored the ruins of the old uranium mine there, reportedly one of the few mines in the area that actually yielded a productive amount of ore.
Jon brought along for the trip eight pint-size cans of Murphy's Irish Stout, and we each popped one open as we began wandering around the lower reaches of Hey Joe Canyon. Our camp was separated from our river landing by a surprisingly shallow section of the pesky tamarisk trees, and people had worn a path between them. Bats love it for feeding. While walking through there at dusk I was startled by a bat whose sonar was clearly confused by the thick tamarisk branches as he flew straight toward me at eye level. At the last moment he pulled back on the reins and we were eye-to-eye for just a moment before he zoomed past me mere inches above my head. Minutes later, I was using a small stick for an impromptu jousting match with a large crayfish swimming in the water next to the spot where my boat was beached.
After exploring the mine ruins we lit the charcoal and settled in for a rib eye steak dinner with mashed potatoes and caesar salad before sipping whiskey while hanging by the campfire as the full moon rose shortly before midnight. Without any weather concerns I kept the fly off my tent to enjoy the sweeping views of the desert sky as my eyelids drifted shut, and I slept soundly as temperatures dipped comfortably overnight into the upper 50s.
That wide range in temperatures that occurs in the still, dry desert air disappears quickly once the sun rises above the canyon walls in the morning, so we broke camp and were back on the river for Day 2 by 9:30 a.m. After only six miles on the river, which barely took more than an hour, we found an appropriate place to land at Bowknot Ridge and started hiking.
Bowknot Ridge separates legs of the river as they head into Bowknot Bend, named by John Wesley Powell for the way that the river's course loops back on itself after eight miles to return to within several hundred yards of where it started.
We planned our timing of this stop to hike before the peak heat of the day. It was nonetheless brutally hot as we ascended the ridge, but the views from the top were well worth the effort and dealing with the heat, which by then was already back into the 90s under the relentlessly blazing sun.
The route climbs to the ridge at its east end, and traversing the top of the ridge from there towards its west end is flat and easy. At the west end we pored over numerous inscriptions in the rock etched by river runners dating back to 1905. Today, of course, such practice is forbidden, so the BLM provides a river runner's log hidden amongst some rocks in an ammo can near the center of the ridge. We added our entry to the log.
We ate lunch and got back into our boats. We floated for about 90 minutes past more abandoned uranium mines in the east wall of Bowknot Bend. A small herd of half dozen or so cattle literally ran past us along the south shore, their spring calves in tow. The current, however, was slower than expected and we resumed paddling all the way to Hellroaring Canyon for a 22-mile day that left us only three miles shy of our take-out.
Just before Hellroaring a beaver swam silently among the tamarisk branches on the west shore. We passed the camp of the people and the dog in the raft early in the morning before our Bowknot hike, exchanging pleasantries via a brief wave from afar, and they would be the only people we'd see on the river all day.
There was plenty of silty, shin-deep, sandal-swallowing river muck at Hellroaring, but the wash had also deposited a significant gravel bar in the river itself. We used driftwood and large rocks to craft a desert sidewalk to largely avoid the muck while walking from river to shore, grabbed a couple of tall Irish stouts and sat in the river on the gravel bar. I took the rare opportunity to clean up and enjoy a bath before we headed off in search of the Denis Julien inscription in Hellroaring.
Julien was a French fur trapper (remember that beaver?), widely believed to be from Quebec although some history accounts place him from New Orleans, who is widely regarded as the first caucasian to explore this area. He also has claim to the first known running of the Class V rapids in Cataract Canyon on one of his trapping reconnaissance missions. He's best known, however, for pecking his name into rocks all over Utah, and his inscription in Hellroaring is the oldest found along the river. Last year, however, we couldn't find it, search as we may.
Nor could we this year. We searched, and searched, and searched along both the Green and north side of the Hellroaring wash, finding nothing but a few cairns of undetermined importance. Frustrated, we gave up after about an hour and returned to camp. An hour or so later, though, before cooking dinner we gave it one more try before dusk settled in, this time checking the improbable south side of the wash. Imagine our surprise, then, to find a big BLM sign 30 yards directly below the inscription to point out its location! ](*,)
As dusk settled in we cooked a hearty dinner of chicken teriyaki rice bowls with snow peas, carrots, pineapple and roasted peanuts. Hundreds of toads emerged from hiding to eat, drink and generally just hang out once the heat of the day had subsided when the sun went away. Once again the full moon rose above the canyon walls as we burned what rubbish we could in our campfire, but we'd call it a night a bit earlier this evening, quickly falling asleep under the twinkling desert stars as jets criss-crossed the nation high overhead, their passengers oblivious to the peaceful wilderness scene unfolded directly beneath them.
We awoke the next morning, packed up our camp and the ashes from our campfire the night before, and shoved off for Day 3 on the river as massive swarms of tadpoles swam in choreographed unison in the pools created by the gravel bar.
As I said, we only had three miles to go and it therefore didn't take long to reach the landing at Mineral Bottom -- less than an hour. We weren't scheduled to be picked up, however, until 3 p.m., so we resigned ourselves to spend four hours in the hot desert sun waiting for our ride. I looked along the shoreline for the appropriate spacing between the Cottonwood trees at the landing to hang my hammock in their shade.
As we approached the landing we were curious about the folks sitting at the launch with several canoes and a raft. They looked to be all packed up to begin a trip down Stillwater Canyon to the Confluence with the Colorado River -- the second half of our trip from last October -- but they clearly weren't in a hurry to go anywhere. Once we arrived we learned that a Canyonlands National Park ranger's inspection put the ix-nay on three of the Grand Junction, Colo. group's water ski-style PFD's, plus they didn't have their toilet seat. Chris from Tag-A-Long had dropped them off and ran back to Moab -- 45 minutes each way -- to grab the missing gear. We were enthused, for that meant that we wouldn't have to wait there for four hours for our pick-up! \
/
Sure enough, we had barely begun unloading our boats when Chris arrived. It turned out that his employer's plan was to have him wait for us at Mineral Bottom after dropping off the Colorado group, so he, too, was happy to not have to spend hours at the landing waiting for us. We loaded up and began the bouncy ride back to Moab via the incredible Mineral Bottom Road that miners had improbably blasted right into the sheer rock canyon walls a thousand feet above the river. It's the kind of thing that you just look at, shake your head in disbelief and wonder aloud, "Who in the world looked at this and thought, 'Gee, this would be the perfect place to build a road!'" And Chris was driving it while pulling a boat trailer.
Chris' Ford Excursion ascended the narrow one-lane dirt switchbacks climbing out of the canyon past the remains of old cars,the drivers of which must've had a really bad day when they slid off the edge. They've been just left there to rot because they were too difficult to remove. Chris' pre-teen daughter, who came along for the ride, clutched the front passenger seat in a white-knuckle death grip as she mentioned how much she disliked this road. Bumping along up the road in the back seat, I told Jon that the one thing I wanted to do before leaving for the 3.5-hour drive home was grab a hot greasy hamburger in Moab. Chris recommended Milt's, which if we hadn't been told where it was, we never would've found it.
Milt's is the oldest restaurant in Moab, founded in 1954 on what was at the time the town's Main Street. The formica lunch counter and it's half dozen stools are all original. And indeed, the hand-formed patty and hand-cut fries were exactly what the doctor ordered!
Once again we used Tag-A-Long Expeditions as a shuttle. We overnighted Friday night in Moab thanks to AmyZ's nearly one million Hilton Honors points, then Chris from Tag-A-Long drove us to the put-in at Ruby Ranch, south of the town of Green River on Saturday morning.
It was hot, hot, hot all weekend, with high temps nearing 100ºF each day. We crafted a kayaker's swamp cooler by frequently dipping our hats and shirts into the silty river water. Jon would supplement that with an absorbent bead-filled sleeve that he would soak before draping it around his neck.
It's nothing but high, arid desert at the put-in, its tan and yellow soil and rock punctuated only by the greenery of Ruby Ranch's irrigated alfalfa operation and the omnipresent tamarisk, an invasive species of tree that creates a nearly impenetrable barrier long the water's edge. It isn't long, however, before the grand cliff walls begin to rise above the shoreline as the river starts to carve its course down into, and eventually through the plateau. For the entire distance to Mineral Bottom, only a handful of ATV trails reach the river's edge from the plateau above.
Large fish would occasionally jump from the water right next to our boat hulls as we paddled for the first seven miles to Tri-Canyon, where we pulled out for lunch. At Tri-Canyon you can paddle a kayak a couple of hundred feet up the narrow, twisting course of the wash before running out of water at what's known as the upper camp. It's too tight to get even a small raft up there, and I suspect too shallow to navigate with a canoe, either, but the roughly three-inch draft of a touring kayak is perfect for spots like this. Situated on a flat, sandy shelf tucked right against the sheer overhanging wall on the north side of the wash, the upper camp affords a bit of welcome shade even at mid-day.
There was one other river party from Colorado at Tri-Canyon spending their second day in a row at the lower camp, situated on the sandy bluff at the entrance to Tri-Canyon. Led by a father who in his youth guided trips down the Green for Colorado Outward Bound, they were doing a leisurely family trip down to Mineral Bottom over eight days with three oar rafts. As we ate lunch we could hear their kids laughing and screaming. When we exited the wash after lunch we immediately saw why.
Besides these three families traveling as one group, on Day 1 we'd see two people and a dog floating on an oar raft, and one family in a jet boat. No one else, although a number of great blue herons would stand silently as a sentinel along the river's edge before taking flight when we got too close for their comfort.
We made a remarkable 21 miles that day, barely skirting to the south of an intense thunderstorm that delivered little more for us than some ferocious microburst upstream winds that immediately created an 18- to 24-inch chop against the river current. Our kayaks, though -- mine a Necky Looksha, and Jon's a rented Wilderness Experience Tsunami 14.5 -- easily muscled through. We could see in the distance numerous cloud-to-ground lightning bolts and sheets of pouring rain falling somewhere in the vicinity of Ruby Ranch. We pulled off the river for the day at Hey Joe Canyon, pitched camp and then explored the ruins of the old uranium mine there, reportedly one of the few mines in the area that actually yielded a productive amount of ore.
Jon brought along for the trip eight pint-size cans of Murphy's Irish Stout, and we each popped one open as we began wandering around the lower reaches of Hey Joe Canyon. Our camp was separated from our river landing by a surprisingly shallow section of the pesky tamarisk trees, and people had worn a path between them. Bats love it for feeding. While walking through there at dusk I was startled by a bat whose sonar was clearly confused by the thick tamarisk branches as he flew straight toward me at eye level. At the last moment he pulled back on the reins and we were eye-to-eye for just a moment before he zoomed past me mere inches above my head. Minutes later, I was using a small stick for an impromptu jousting match with a large crayfish swimming in the water next to the spot where my boat was beached.
After exploring the mine ruins we lit the charcoal and settled in for a rib eye steak dinner with mashed potatoes and caesar salad before sipping whiskey while hanging by the campfire as the full moon rose shortly before midnight. Without any weather concerns I kept the fly off my tent to enjoy the sweeping views of the desert sky as my eyelids drifted shut, and I slept soundly as temperatures dipped comfortably overnight into the upper 50s.
That wide range in temperatures that occurs in the still, dry desert air disappears quickly once the sun rises above the canyon walls in the morning, so we broke camp and were back on the river for Day 2 by 9:30 a.m. After only six miles on the river, which barely took more than an hour, we found an appropriate place to land at Bowknot Ridge and started hiking.
Bowknot Ridge separates legs of the river as they head into Bowknot Bend, named by John Wesley Powell for the way that the river's course loops back on itself after eight miles to return to within several hundred yards of where it started.
We planned our timing of this stop to hike before the peak heat of the day. It was nonetheless brutally hot as we ascended the ridge, but the views from the top were well worth the effort and dealing with the heat, which by then was already back into the 90s under the relentlessly blazing sun.
The route climbs to the ridge at its east end, and traversing the top of the ridge from there towards its west end is flat and easy. At the west end we pored over numerous inscriptions in the rock etched by river runners dating back to 1905. Today, of course, such practice is forbidden, so the BLM provides a river runner's log hidden amongst some rocks in an ammo can near the center of the ridge. We added our entry to the log.
We ate lunch and got back into our boats. We floated for about 90 minutes past more abandoned uranium mines in the east wall of Bowknot Bend. A small herd of half dozen or so cattle literally ran past us along the south shore, their spring calves in tow. The current, however, was slower than expected and we resumed paddling all the way to Hellroaring Canyon for a 22-mile day that left us only three miles shy of our take-out.
Just before Hellroaring a beaver swam silently among the tamarisk branches on the west shore. We passed the camp of the people and the dog in the raft early in the morning before our Bowknot hike, exchanging pleasantries via a brief wave from afar, and they would be the only people we'd see on the river all day.
There was plenty of silty, shin-deep, sandal-swallowing river muck at Hellroaring, but the wash had also deposited a significant gravel bar in the river itself. We used driftwood and large rocks to craft a desert sidewalk to largely avoid the muck while walking from river to shore, grabbed a couple of tall Irish stouts and sat in the river on the gravel bar. I took the rare opportunity to clean up and enjoy a bath before we headed off in search of the Denis Julien inscription in Hellroaring.
Julien was a French fur trapper (remember that beaver?), widely believed to be from Quebec although some history accounts place him from New Orleans, who is widely regarded as the first caucasian to explore this area. He also has claim to the first known running of the Class V rapids in Cataract Canyon on one of his trapping reconnaissance missions. He's best known, however, for pecking his name into rocks all over Utah, and his inscription in Hellroaring is the oldest found along the river. Last year, however, we couldn't find it, search as we may.
Nor could we this year. We searched, and searched, and searched along both the Green and north side of the Hellroaring wash, finding nothing but a few cairns of undetermined importance. Frustrated, we gave up after about an hour and returned to camp. An hour or so later, though, before cooking dinner we gave it one more try before dusk settled in, this time checking the improbable south side of the wash. Imagine our surprise, then, to find a big BLM sign 30 yards directly below the inscription to point out its location! ](*,)
As dusk settled in we cooked a hearty dinner of chicken teriyaki rice bowls with snow peas, carrots, pineapple and roasted peanuts. Hundreds of toads emerged from hiding to eat, drink and generally just hang out once the heat of the day had subsided when the sun went away. Once again the full moon rose above the canyon walls as we burned what rubbish we could in our campfire, but we'd call it a night a bit earlier this evening, quickly falling asleep under the twinkling desert stars as jets criss-crossed the nation high overhead, their passengers oblivious to the peaceful wilderness scene unfolded directly beneath them.
We awoke the next morning, packed up our camp and the ashes from our campfire the night before, and shoved off for Day 3 on the river as massive swarms of tadpoles swam in choreographed unison in the pools created by the gravel bar.
As I said, we only had three miles to go and it therefore didn't take long to reach the landing at Mineral Bottom -- less than an hour. We weren't scheduled to be picked up, however, until 3 p.m., so we resigned ourselves to spend four hours in the hot desert sun waiting for our ride. I looked along the shoreline for the appropriate spacing between the Cottonwood trees at the landing to hang my hammock in their shade.
As we approached the landing we were curious about the folks sitting at the launch with several canoes and a raft. They looked to be all packed up to begin a trip down Stillwater Canyon to the Confluence with the Colorado River -- the second half of our trip from last October -- but they clearly weren't in a hurry to go anywhere. Once we arrived we learned that a Canyonlands National Park ranger's inspection put the ix-nay on three of the Grand Junction, Colo. group's water ski-style PFD's, plus they didn't have their toilet seat. Chris from Tag-A-Long had dropped them off and ran back to Moab -- 45 minutes each way -- to grab the missing gear. We were enthused, for that meant that we wouldn't have to wait there for four hours for our pick-up! \
/ Sure enough, we had barely begun unloading our boats when Chris arrived. It turned out that his employer's plan was to have him wait for us at Mineral Bottom after dropping off the Colorado group, so he, too, was happy to not have to spend hours at the landing waiting for us. We loaded up and began the bouncy ride back to Moab via the incredible Mineral Bottom Road that miners had improbably blasted right into the sheer rock canyon walls a thousand feet above the river. It's the kind of thing that you just look at, shake your head in disbelief and wonder aloud, "Who in the world looked at this and thought, 'Gee, this would be the perfect place to build a road!'" And Chris was driving it while pulling a boat trailer.
Chris' Ford Excursion ascended the narrow one-lane dirt switchbacks climbing out of the canyon past the remains of old cars,the drivers of which must've had a really bad day when they slid off the edge. They've been just left there to rot because they were too difficult to remove. Chris' pre-teen daughter, who came along for the ride, clutched the front passenger seat in a white-knuckle death grip as she mentioned how much she disliked this road. Bumping along up the road in the back seat, I told Jon that the one thing I wanted to do before leaving for the 3.5-hour drive home was grab a hot greasy hamburger in Moab. Chris recommended Milt's, which if we hadn't been told where it was, we never would've found it.
Milt's is the oldest restaurant in Moab, founded in 1954 on what was at the time the town's Main Street. The formica lunch counter and it's half dozen stools are all original. And indeed, the hand-formed patty and hand-cut fries were exactly what the doctor ordered!
