Day 4: July 9 Sunday — Spring Canyon Point to White Wash Overlook near Oil Well

Highlights: Spring Canyon Point views; Bowknot Bend; Serengeti; steering wheel breaks; The Very End; oil well with cattle; The Parkway; driving on mud wash-turned-quicksand; White Wash; Red Wash; ’39 Chrysler; Ruby Ranch; swimming in Green River; brief storm at camp.

I had a better sleep last night, despite being too hot, while the experiences of others varied due to bugs. We were up around 6:00 a.m., had a quick breakfast of baked beans with beans on the side, and were packed up ready to leave by 8:30. This crew was turning out to be the most efficient in Greenshit history: not only did everyone consistently wake up around sunrise, but we usually had full breakfasts, dishes washed, and camp packed in less than three hours, record time by Greenshit standards. Certainly it helps to have six adults share the work, but also, everyone always knew what to do and nobody needed to direct, which made the Greenmeister’s job a breeze.

It was still early in the morning when the temperature was already into the 90’s. Lou remarked “It’s gonna be a hot one today!”, a phrase to be repeated every morning of this trip. This became so predictable that, for all I know, he still says this to his wife every day before work.

In order to depart from the campsite it was necessary to turn Pequod around because it was blocking the exit, in a spot that was little wider than the jeep, hemmed in by a wall on one side and a two-foot cliff on the other. But with precision driving Terry flipped the jeep around, using split-second manipulations of the parking brake, clutch, foot brake, gas pedal and shift lever with only four limbs of his body.

A few minutes out of camp, right after beginning the drive back on the Spring Canyon Point Trail, the point was thin enough that we could sense a nearby edge in both directions. Lou suggested that we stop and walk a few feet to the major lip on the left. Sure enough, this was yet another awesome spot, with a very long view directly down Labyrinth Canyon to the north and the large curve around Spring Canyon Point to the southwest. We chided ourselves for not setting up our camp here, but I reminded the others that shade was the criterion last night. Choosing a campsite in Canyon Country is always a risk, since you never know whether a much better site is just around the corner.

Six hundred feet below this lip, squeezed into seemingly no space between the water and the canyon wall, was the faint Spring Canyon Trail. We recalled that in 1989, prior to reaching the tamarisks that forced our retreat, we stopped at one of the mud banks along the river for a swim, where we had a hilarious time watching the boys coat themselves with mud from head to toe. I still wish I had had the guts to do that.

From a caver’s perspective, I like to contemplate a 600' rappel from the overhanging lip of a canyon such as this, after having experienced the 600' free drop in total darkness in Ellison Cave’s Fantastic Pit in Georgia. I don’t know if being able to see all the way down would be terrifying or thrilling. But as we discovered on Greenshit ’94, the 100° heat is a big deterrent to climbing back up, not to mention the hassle of bringing a 70-lb climbing rope out here.

After taking some pictures of people’s legs dangling over the cliff, we returned to the Spring Canyon Point Trail, keeping a lookout for a right turn which I believed might be either a hiking trail or jeep trail to a great view from the south rim. We finally found a turn that might have been driven on once in recorded history, and took it for a few yards until it became undrivable within 100' of the rim. Again we were 600' above the Green River, this time with a marvelous view of Bowknot Bend, a giant 7½ mile meander of Labyrinth Canyon that loops around to within a few hundred feet of itself. The massive teardrop-shaped plateau in the center covers about four square miles, has 600′ cliffs all around, and is connected to the mainland by only a thin ridge. The top of that ridge is eroded a couple hundred feet lower than the plateau on either side, making the Bowknot completely unreachable except by helicopter. It reminded me of the fictional Lost World, although the largest remaining dinosaur out there is probably a collared lizard. I wonder if there is any place in the U.S. so large that can’t be reached without technical aid. (The Bowknot and the neighboring area on the west side of the Green River, we later found out, is protected by the Bureau of Land Management as a Wilderness Study Area and closed to vehicles, which probably includes helicopters.) From our vantage point on the rim of Spring Canyon Point, we looked almost directly south at the side of the ridge, and because it was lower than us we could see the Green River on both sides of it. The 7½ mile circle of Labyrinth Canyon around the Bowknot was visible, too, but much of it was so far in the distance that you had to concentrate to distinguish it from the numerous side canyons. Looking carefully, it was possible to make out the mouth of Spring Canyon where it meets Labyrinth part way around the Bowknot. An aerial photo (or even a look at a map) of this area is impressive.

Since this viewpoint was overhung, it was necessary to throw rocks. This time Chris and Terry could hit the river. It was clear they would be the champion rock throwers of the trip. As usual, we spent a few minutes dangling legs off the lip and taking photos of not-so-macho choreographed jumps across one-foot gaps hundreds of feet deep. In this area we found an object embedded in the rock with wires coming out of it. We reasoned that it was a geophone, used to measure seismic reflections from blasting for oil exploration.

The half-mile wide section of Spring Canyon Point that we were on is one of several large arms of the point, and I wanted to see some others that are more off the beaten path. Driving further back up Spring Canyon Point Trail, where the point was several miles wide, we turned onto a connecting trail to the north that was to take us to another location on a northerly arm of Spring Canyon Point. This trail was two perfectly straight tire tracks, vanishing into infinity on a gently curving plain of sand and desert shrubs that Lou likened to the Serengeti. Here, it didn’t even look like a desert, because everything was lush and green—not a single brown or dried-out plant in sight. Even though it was primitive, the trail was extremely smooth, allowing us to reach 40 m.p.h., the most that Terry and I could stand. Unlike the excruciating 60 m.p.h. highway drive yesterday, this brief run was refreshing. One welcome feature of a folded down windshield is the breeze in your face, even at very slow speeds. While wind dries out your body even more, it cools you down as long as you drink enough water.

Along this stretch Terry noticed that Pequod’s steering wheel sported an interesting tilt mechanism, permitting sideways and diagonal tilt in addition to the more popular up and down motions. In fact, the wheel was almost completely loose, as if it was connected to the steering column by a ball joint, and there was no way to tighten it. While steering was unaffected—you could still rotate the wheel just fine—it was not comforting trusting our lives to a stick in a bowl of jelly. We decided this behavior was good for neither us nor the flexible joint in the steering column, assuming there was a joint in there, so we had to remedy this.

In blistering 114° in the middle of a shadeless prairie, I dug out the tool box, hoping I would come up with a clever idea for a repair before someone asked me what I planned to do with the tools. Sometimes I find that just staring at a pile of tools and hardware gives you an idea.

We were unable to access the loose part of the steering column, as we could find no way to remove the plastic shroud designed to prevent thieves from defeating the ignition switch. But we decided that the heavy duty shroud itself could be used as a brace to limit the play in the column. The trick would be simply to drive wedges between the shroud and the steering column (only the internal portion of which rotates). After trying some screws and bolts as wedges which just fell out or lost themselves inside the shroud, we came upon the most creative idea: flattened beer cans. In fact, with enough beer cans, a hammer, a rock as an anvil, and a lot of time, you can manufacture any piece of equipment known to man.

We made five precision curved, chamfered aluminum chocks with flanges to keep them from falling inside the shroud, and wedged them tightly in the gap between the column and the shroud. We applied miles of duct tape to hold it all together, providing that finished, glossy gray sheen of which any professional duct taper would be proud. For more strength and an added touch of elegance, we strung picture wire between various points on the steering column and the dash. While we were careful to assure that these aftermarket modifications did not interfere with the operation of the jeep, we later encountered an oversight: it was not possible to remove the ignition key— a minor problem of no consequence in Canyon Country. I will forever be proud of this repair, as it performed flawlessly for the next eight hard days of jeeping. I would not be surprised if Rick keeps it that way till next year.

This repair in the relentless heat took over an hour, requiring the ingestion of many beers. Too many more of these incidents, and we’ll go dry before Green River. Proceeding on through the Serengeti, the trail ended at a T with an even more obscure trail. It was not clear which way would take us west, as it depended on precisely where we were in relation to nearby drainages, and the lack of distinctive topography made it difficult to pinpoint our location on the map. After a brief false start in the wrong direction we decided the correct way was left, and with easy driving in terrain similar to the Mineral Point Road we soon reached The Very End, a dead end that did not quite reach an overlook like the other points we had visited. Instead, the trail stopped about a quarter mile short of the lip at slickrock ledges with numerous little crevasses and a series of rugged bumps that slowly worked their way to a lower level. Though we were not right at the lip, we could easily see Labyrinth Canyon making almost a complete loop around us in the distance.

As usual, determined to defy nature, I tried to get Mark to drive Pequod past The Very End by guiding him inch by inch through this rough area, but within fifty feet I got him cornered where the only way out was a difficult U-turn. I took the wheel, extricated the jeep, and drove back to the others, where we decided to give up and have lunch. On retrospect it would have been silly to coerce the jeeps to the tortuous end just to see a view, when walking there would have been much faster, and someone has to get out and walk anyway to guide the jeeps. With all the views we had already today and yesterday, we weren’t motivated to walk a quarter mile in these blazing conditions for yet another one.

After lunch we took a slightly different way back east to seek out a trail called Oil Well Road. This was easier to find than I expected: consistently I surprised myself by finding out we were on the right trail after being certain we were lost. As advertised, halfway down this dirt road were some large tanks and an oil well. The equipment was not in operation at the moment, but in good enough shape that it might still be in use. Here we saw our first close-up cattle: a herd of about ten, huddled in the shade of the equipment. There may also have been a watering hole at this well to attract the cattle.

Oil Well Road led us to The Parkway, a challenging 30-minute run through an area of colorful frozen sand dunes and slickrock, with steep pitches that were a lot of fun. Bickers said that this was a popular trail, so I expected thousands of dune buggy and ATV tracks crisscrossing the countryside, but the area was immaculate and the trail was not easy to see. Since we had not seen a soul for a couple of days, and did not expect to see any until late tomorrow, it felt very much like we were explorers on a route to the great unknown. By now, Mark was gaining a measure of confidence and sophistication as he drove with a cigarette in his left hand while operating the steering wheel and shift lever with his right.

The last stretch of The Parkway was up the side of a wash on a smooth slope so steep that I was worried about getting enough traction, but the slickrock/rubber combination worked its miracles again. After this slope we found our way to Freckle Flat Trail, also known as Dripping Springs Road, depending on whose guidebook you read, pointing out the fact that one man’s trail is another man’s road. The relatively easy trail led to a verdant little valley with tall grass, huge cottonwoods, birds, bees, and signs of recent ranching activities such as corrals and fences.

Desperate for a cool dip in the “Dripping Spring” that must be somewhere around here, I decided to take us up the wash for a bit towards the dense greenery, instead of continuing up the other side on the main trail. We drove on hard mud flats in the center of the wash, occasionally going up a sand bank on one side and then down again, but we never saw more than mud and a surface coating of moisture. The springs seemed to be mere seeps coming out of the side of the wash. Most of the moisture—and there was clearly a lot of it—was subsurface, swimmable only if we dug a pool.

After a quarter mile I decided that this spring was not going to pan out, so we turned around. On the way back, I noticed that our former tracks in this “hard packed” mud were now full of water. Looking to the side, I saw waves in the mud as we drove by— quicksand! Even if it seems very stiff, quicksand gets softer and softer the more you disturb it, and with this amount of moisture, it could easily swallow our tires, if not our whole jeeps. I immediately radioed to the others to keep up the speed, don’t stop and drive smoothly. I should have known better than drive out here, having been the victim of several dry-mud- turned-quicksand episodes in the past. The security of three jeeps often made me a little overconfident, sometimes to the point of carelessness. On the other hand, we could have towed a stuck jeep, providing all of us were not stuck.

But we departed the wash with nobody except me even noticing the danger, to intersect Tenmile Point Road, the route to the next major point north. Since it was getting late in the afternoon, and it was our last night out before Green River, I decided to save Tenmile Point for another trip and use that road simply as an access to the trails that would lead us closer to town.

North of Tenmile Point the deep canyons, gorges and washes flatten out to the point where there is no significant topographic feature more than a couple hundred feet high. The rim of Labyrinth Canyon gets closer to the level of the Green River, until the river just meanders down a flat plain. The trails from Tenmile Point Road to the town of Green River cross an extensive area of this relatively flat, desolate terrain and I expected them to be extremely obscure, as the only mention of one of them is Barnes, and he warns not to go there in the summer.

We headed west on the graded Tenmile Point Road and easily found the intersection with the primitive White Wash/Ruby Ranch Trail (also called the Red Wash Trail depending on which wash you name it after). While the trail was vague, the driving was mostly easy on packed dirt. The ride across Red Wash and then White Wash was not the boring drive in barren desert that I had expected. It was through brilliant open country of multicolored frozen dunes and little canyons, with distant views of sandstone cliffs in all directions and the snow-covered La Sal Mountains in the west. Red Wash and White Wash are half-mile wide shallow troughs instead of deep canyons. Their beautiful colors (red and white, of course) and feeling of open space made for a refreshing change after all those deep canyons. As we drove down this trail I felt particularly remote from civilization: we were not by any scenic vistas and equally far from the two closest towns, Moab and Green River. We hadn’t seen other people since Grand View Point, now only a distant memory.

As we approached the end of White Wash/Ruby Ranch Trail we saw an oil derrick behind a distant rise. Soon, in the middle of a vast prairie, we passed through a cattle gate in a fence stretching to the hills in both directions, one of several we crossed on this trip. The fences are placed on BLM land by ranchers and the rule is to leave the gates as you find them: closed or opened. The gates are usually just barbed wire held across the road by tension, but this particular one was ridiculously tight—it took three of us to close it.

This fence was not like the others, though, in that it delineated private property. A sign here indicated that we were leaving BLM land. This meant that travel is allowed but the landowner, wherever he is, wants you to be nice to his property. Soon after the fence we saw a sign of civilization: the rusting hulk of a 1939 Chrysler perched on a mound. Even out here, steel rusts in 56 years.

This trail quickly led us to the Floy Wash Road (also confusingly called the Ruby Ranch Road), a well-maintained dirt road between I-70 twelve miles from here and the Ruby Ranch next to the Green River two miles in the other direction. I didn’t know what to expect at the Ruby Ranch, knowing only that it was near water which we desperately craved to jump into. As we approached the river we could see the buildings of the ranch to the right, with fences and lots of greenery nestled along the bank. It was obviously an inhabited, thriving ranch—a rare sight in Canyon Country—so we opted not to drive to the end of the road and jump naked into the water in front of their house. Instead, we turned left along a spur in the opposite direction along the river. But this spur led to an opening in a fence with a “No Trespassing” sign and a notice that boaters must request permission from the ranch to launch here. We didn’t have boats, and rather than take a chance asking for permission that might be denied, we returned back down the Ruby Ranch Road a half mile to another spur in the same direction that bypassed the boat launch area. This spur led us about a mile to a flat area just a few feet from the river, separated from us by a row of tamarisks, and there were no signs.

We stopped the jeeps and leaped into the water. It was frigid, opaque, gray liquid mud and felt wonderful. The bank was nearly quicksand where we’d sink to our knees if we stood in one spot long enough, and it dropped off very steeply at the edge of the water. But once we were in the water we could stand comfortably waist deep. I suggested it was not wise to wear sandals in the water, because they would get glued to the mud bottom and rip off your feet. Standing barefoot was very comfortable. A few feet out from shore the water was over our heads, but nobody ventured that far because the current was flowing at a blinding speed, and the river was several hundred feet wide. There were few places along the shore where you could safely enter waist deep—we were very lucky to find this little protected eddy. We spent a long time washing and playing in the water, making “quicksand waves” in the mud bank, and trying to scare ourselves into believing that a piece of dead wood circling in an eddy upstream was a crocodile. I brought out my glass thermometer and asked people to guess the water temperature. The guesses were mostly in the 60’s, but I guessed 75° and Terry said decisively that it was 70.5°. The answer: 70.5°!

Even though the water appeared (and was) muddy, when you get out and it dries, you are hard pressed to make out the faintest hint of dust on your skin, and it easily brushes off. With soap, skin and hair come out perfectly clean. Despite air temperature still near 100°, evaporation of river water from skin in this low humidity is chilling. As patches of water dry out, the sensation on your skin transitions instantly from ice cubes to toaster oven.

When we returned to the jeeps we saw our first jackrabbit, a hundred feet away in the bushes, looking much like a normal New England bunny except gray and with ears as big as the rest of its body. The ears aren’t that big for better hearing—they serve as a cooling mechanism.

It was now near 6 p.m. and the sky was threatening. While we all were hoping for a drenching rain to cool us off, I was worried about lightning, camping out in this open country. On the map, I picked a spot three miles back up the Ruby Ranch Road next to some hills where we would not be the highest objects for miles. We easily found that spot, a few hundred feet off the road on the beginning of a 4WD trail, and chose a great campsite on a large expanse of red slickrock, part way up on the side of a protective butte with a 180° panoramic view of White Wash, Red Wash, and most of our day’s travels to the south. I’m pretty sure this spot is at a turnoff just before Barnes’ White Wash Trail (not to be confused with any of the identical trail names we just came from). It turned out that this spot was just around the hill from that oil derrick we saw a couple of hours ago.

That threatening sky was now becoming a menacing storm, and it was moving toward us, so we postponed setting up things that might get blown away. All we took out were our chairs and another bottle of booze (I forgot what we had this time) with which to watch the storm.

The storm started out as virga that we see almost daily in the desert: rain evaporating before it hits the ground. From a distance, the wisps of virga descending from the clouds look like normal rain except they end while still high in the sky. Even so, a virga storm can have lightning and thunder. But the wisps from this storm got lower and lower as the storm approached, truly threatening to get us wet. We had darkness, high winds, and lightning. When the clouds passed directly overhead we could see the rain above, but still no water down here.

The wind, thunder and lightning became violent, and finally the rain hit—all 50 drops of it. After five minutes of scattered sprinkles, the storm slowly departed, the whole episode lasting over an hour. As the winds subsided, the sun came back out and it got hot, we felt pretty silly sitting there, hunkered down in our raincoats. We developed a new method of measuring precipitation from these kinds of storms: the average distance between the spots left by the individual raindrops on the jeeps. This was a “two-inch storm”, equivalent to about 0.0015” precipitation by conventional measure.

Due to the storm and late hour, we had Terry’s one-pot meal: Jambalaya. It tasted a lot better than one-pot meals should. When it got dark we played with the laser pointer that I always bring on Greenshit trips, attempting to make it reach to the distant buttes. But since the full moon came up, it was too bright to get much benefit from the pointer. We spent a long time looking through binoculars and a small telescope to see the moons of Jupiter—we spotted two of them— and I determined that the bright, reddish object below Jupiter, that we previously thought was Mars, was Antares since it formed a key star to the constellation Scorpius.

Those who slept outside reported that the bugs that hovered around us in the evening subsided. I slept in the tent, waking up every five minutes thinking it was morning because the moon was so bright.