Day 11: July 16 Sunday — Doll House Layover

Hike to Spanish Bottom; swimming in Colorado; fossils along trail; joints and fissures at Doll House; Beehive Arch; chimneying practice; climbing into window over campsite; sauerkraut.

As with the Maze Overlook, there are a number of short and long hikes from here that make good day trips. We decided on a half-day hike to Spanish Bottom, a 1.2-mile trail that drops 1200 feet to the Colorado River, offering the possibility of swimming in the river. This is the only trail into Cataract Canyon from the west side of the river in its entire 40 miles. Interestingly, the only way into the canyon from the east side is down Lower Red Lake Canyon, directly across from Spanish Bottom. Unlike the Maze Overlook trail, the Spanish Bottom trail is an easy, continuous grade down 56 switchbacks. The round trip hike is often done as a day trip by rafters who camp at Spanish Bottom and come up to relieve their claustrophobia after five days in the bottom of the canyon. The trail descends through many strata that make up the most ancient layers of rock and sediment in Canyon Country.

It took us an hour to reach the bottom, and a short hike across the flats to the river brought us to the same old scene: a tamarisk-infested shoreline with steep mud cliffs into serious current. Chris, Terry and I walked a quarter mile south along the bank, looking for a safe place to go in. Chris found an eddy among the rocks that was difficult to enter, and frightening enough that we belayed him with a rope tied to his wrist while he washed up. I decided to go in by the mud banks, so I returned to where Ed, Lou and Mark were resting in the shade of a cottonwood overhanging the river. Ed had already been in the water underneath this cottonwood, but he said it was very hard to get back up the slippery bank. I rigged a handline with a series of loops, and descended hand-over- hand. It was easy standing waist deep in the water, but it was so cold that I could only dunk myself for a few seconds. I might have tried to stay in longer, but I was not hot enough to need it. After I came out I was forced to go back in a second time so that Ed could take pictures.

Lou was worried about making it back up the climb, so he went first with Ed and Chris while Mark, Terry and I started later, taking lots of photo breaks on the way and admiring the view. By doing it so slowly we saw things we hadn’t noticed on the way down. The most interesting were the fossils, mostly crinoids that looked like segmented cylinders embedded in the rock, from minuscule to quarter inch across, and up to a couple inches long. I also found a fossil in the shape of a one-inch scallop shell. These fossils are similar to the ones I see frequently in limestone caves, but this isn’t limestone.

Usually the hike up this trail in the summer is torture, but today with the temperature barely 90°, I thought it rather pleasant. We got to the top well after the others. At the campsite we learned that their total round trip time was 2½ hours. Lou was sitting there in a lounge chair, exhausted. “Morrie, I died on the way up,” he said, an understandable comment since he had to carry almost twice my weight. I felt sorry for him, but not enough to offer him one of my four beers.

This was an opportunity for our first and only campsite lunch. Some of us had ham sandwiches while Terry made tuna and white beans. After lunch everyone except Lou took a brief walk to some cool joints and slots between the rocks around the corner from the campsite. Then Ed returned to camp while the rest of us continued on a marked trail through part of the Doll House and then north to Beehive Arch about a mile away.

The landscape north of the Doll House was spectacular. We could see spires in all directions, except in the west where the land dropped off into Cataract Canyon. This trail has patches of what I consider world class cryptogamic soil: little pinnacles up to four inches tall, forming a miniature landscape of buttes and canyons—sort of a bonsai Canyonlands.

From the approach along the trail, Beehive Arch looks like a ten-foot round hole through a wall at ground level, and you could walk right into it. But from the other side the hole is six feet off the ground and the beautiful arch shape is evident. We spent a long time climbing up neighboring rocks trying to get a good view of the arch, and then we took turns up and down the difficult climb to the hole from the low side. Since people appeared to be in a climbing mood, I took them to another set of rocks where we practiced chimneying in a fissure.

Back at camp, I suggested a climb through the rocks to a window overlooking the campsite from about 40′ up. Mark, Chris and I decided to do it, and Ed followed to film it. The first part is a steep scramble about a hundred feet up a wide crevice full of breakdown. As the crevice narrows some breakdown blocks are jammed into it, menacingly above our heads, giving us an experience reminiscent of caving. Ed returned to the campsite when the going got too rough for sandals and video camera. After the three of us emerged from the crevice we turned right into a crack in the wall and were immediately in the window, overlooking Ed and Lou at the campsite. While we stood here Terry came up from behind, having secretly followed us, so Ed had to opportunity to film all four of us through the window as silhouettes against the sky. Beyond the diversion into the window we climbed further among the rocks to a little canyon with an interesting chimneying down-climb back to the campsite that took us about 45 minutes.

Later that evening Chris climbed high up one wall of the campsite while I climbed up the other, giving us nice aerial views of the campsite. On my side there was some climber’s rigging jammed into a crack way above my head. I consider it littering to leave your rigging, but since I couldn’t get up there to remove it, perhaps the climbers couldn’t, either.

Tonight we had Ed’s famous “lousy corned beef and cabbage,” comprised of canned corned beef and sauerkraut. There were mass quantities, especially of the kraut, that we could not finish. Being a sauerkraut fan, I liked it, but I don’t think everyone else did. After dinner we packed our jeeps as much as possible in preparation for the next day’s 12 hour drive back to town.

I laid down in my sleeping bag on its ground cloth exactly where I was the night before, and in a few minutes I felt a tickle, tickle on my arms. Then another tickle on my legs, I turned on my flashlight and was horrified to find my ground cloth covered with ants. They were red ants, but harmless. I brushed off the ants and shook out my sleeping bag, while deciding whether to move or set up the tent. Since nobody else seemed to have my problem, I picked a new spot next to Mark, right in the center of the campsite’s driveway.

Five minutes after I turned my light off, I felt another tickle on my arms, which I wiped off. For the next several hours, I lay awake, brushing the ants from my arms and legs every few minutes. Several times I turned on my flashlight and stamped out all the ants I saw, which gave me about fifteen minutes of peace. I figured that there had to be a finite number of them, so I just kept at it. Sure enough, well after midnight, the ants retreated. I was frustrated, as it would have been a lot easier just to set up the tent in the first place.

Lying awake in the middle of the night, looking at the stars, the rocks above me lit up. Was the moon rising? The light quickly got brighter, and I realized that this was from the headlights of another vehicle arriving at the campsite. I was certain it was the people who had reserved this site, coming back after a long “day” drive. I thought how great a story it would make to be killed on a jeep trip getting run over by a jeep, since Mark and I were lying in the road. Any instant I expected a glaring headlight in my face, but thankfully, the lights never came. I heard the intruders drive around a while and stop, and for the next hour there was faint talking and occasional banging, as if they were unloading camping equipment and setting up at the neighboring site. Since that site is on the other side of a hundred-foot thick wall, their sounds were very faint. I thought it curious that they would have gone directly to the other site. Ours was the first site they would have checked if they didn’t have a reservation, and if they did have a reservation it would have been for our site. But I was grateful, and after a while the noise and lights stopped.

An hour later my ground cloth suddenly whacked me in the face, accompanied by a blast of sand. The wind had picked up and my cloth was flapping wildly. Mark next to me had the same problem, and we both got up to hold them down with rocks. But that wasn’t enough, because I still kept getting sandblasted by each gust of wind. Every few minutes, realizing that I was covered with grit, I had to get up to brush myself off. I repeatedly cursed myself for not setting up the tent hours ago. Nonetheless, I kept suffering the rest of the night, hoping that the wind would subside any minute.