Day 7: July 12 Wednesday — Keg Spring Canyon Overlook to Keg Point

Highlights: Couldn’t find trail to spring at Keg Knoll; Keg Point trail closed in WSA; Bowknot hike attempt; camp on dead-end road overlooking valley; brief storm with lots of rain; cigars; Lagavulin.

I decided we needed a very short day of driving today. We had been on the move every day so far, which was not particularly stressful, but I wanted us to have more time to relax in the evenings. The long hot days in the jeeps were wearing people down. I set a goal of the nearby Keg Point, a huge plateau with several major arms that jut several miles out toward the river between Keg Spring Canyon where we were now and Horseshoe Canyon, the next canyon to the south. This area encompasses several huge meanders of the river, including all of Bowknot Bend. I particularly wanted to get to the spot along the rim of Labyrinth Canyon just opposite Spring Canyon Point where we had been several days earlier. But my main goal, that I was eyeing ever since I planned this trip months ago, was to stand as close as possible to the thinnest point of the Bowknot. I knew from the view at Spring Canyon Point that it would not be possible to walk onto the connecting ridge itself, but it looked like it might be possible to drive a jeep to the dropoff just before that, and then gaze with awe into Labyrinth Canyon on both sides of the ridge.

We departed the Keg Spring Canyon campsite by returning to the Loop Road and then rejoining the Green River Road at an intersection called Lookout Point. It’s the wimpiest lookout you ever saw, a wide mound only about twenty feet high. It would be completely unnoticeable anywhere else, but because the land is so flat here, it does provide a kind of lookout. From Lookout Point we entered Antelope Valley, which is not really a valley, but the name for the southeastern edge of the San Rafael Desert.

The Keg Point Trail departs the Green River Road in the middle of Antelope Valley and heads east toward the river. A little way down, past a small rise named Keg Knoll, the topo showed a half-mile spur to the Old Man Spring. The odds of finding much water at the spring were small, but, as was the case with Dripping Spring, I reasoned that any spring worth naming would be interesting to see. Just over Keg Knoll we began looking for the side trail, but all we found was a short spur to some red slickrock. After some scouting, we decided there was no 4WD trail in this area. We could see the end of the knoll where the spring was located, and it certainly would have been possible to walk there in about twenty minutes, but driving would have taken a long time, blazing our own trail over the countryside. I guessed that the trail marked on the map was really a footpath, not a jeep trail, even though we did not even see footprints in this area.

We decided to go back to the Keg Point Trail and press on toward Keg Point in order to make it the promised short day. A mile past Keg Knoll we found a mile long spur trail that took us to an impressive overlook of Horseshoe Canyon.

Back on the main Keg Point Trail, we headed east again, with easy driving for a few miles, but once more I lost our position on the map when the topography became indistinct. Some day, I’ll invest in a GPS receiver, a device using satellite signals that pinpoints your location to 30 feet. We came to a side trail on the right near a drill hole with a pipe stuck in the ground. It’s funny how, after several days in the wilderness, even the most insignificant man-made object, like a piece of pipe, becomes an item of note.

There was a drill hole marked on the topo, but I did not think it was the same one we were at. I chose to go straight, but rapidly the easy trail became hard to follow. We began driving on stretches of trailless slickrock alternating with faint tracks in the sand. Eventually we lost the trail completely as we wandered aimlessly on vast slickrock expanses. According to the compass we were going in the right direction, but once more we were blazing our own trail. This time, however, we left almost no tracks and destroyed no bushes. Occasionally we would see a set of tracks in the sand and then immediately lose them. Were we incredibly lucky finding the trail each time we saw these tracks, or were there really tracks all over the place from other lost souls?

Eventually we came to a serious little depression that threatened to rip the tailgates off our jeeps. But the jeeps made it down this bump without incident by driving diagonally, though both Harpoon and Great White were within millimeters of their rear ends. Immediately beyond, in a section of sand, we saw the trail again, except there was a wooden post in the middle of it. On the post was a tiny BLM sign indicating that the region beyond was a “Wilderness Study Area” and that all forms of mechanized travel, including bikes, were prohibited. A Wilderness Study Area is a region being considered for full “Wilderness Area” protection, where it is supposed to be left as primitive as nature originally intended. We have several Wilderness Areas in the White Mountains of New England, such as the Pemigewassett and the Great Gulf.

This presented a serious ethical dilemma that we discussed for a long time. I support the concept of Wilderness Areas, but I don’t always agree with the way they’re implemented. Instead of simply disallowing the truly damaging activities like grazing, mining and chaining, they disallow all motorized vehicle use, even on existing, established 4WD trails that have been there for years and will not disappear for a century. I don’t see how an occasional jeep driving on an established trail has any adverse effect on the landscape, especially in places such as this with an incredibly low visitation rate. True, the goal of “wilderness” is to keep the region wild, uncut by man-made structures such as roads, but there are so many square miles of wilderness on either side of these 4WD trails that use of the trail itself would have no impact on the area. Some Wilderness Areas do in fact have travel corridors, where motorized vehicle use is allowed only on the trail, and given the vast size of Keg Point and its inaccessibility, this would have been a great place to implement such a corridor.

Wilderness weenies like to point out how small a fraction of the millions of acres of BLM land are included in their wilderness proposals. They fail to tell you out that this small percentage includes most of the most interesting areas in Canyon Country.

I knew that the Republican Congress was at that moment contemplating a bill that would dramatically gut proposed and current wilderness areas in Utah, and I was violently opposed to that because it would permit all the commercial activities that permanently mar the landscape. I had no way of telling whether passage of the bill would have canceled this particular Wilderness Study Area, but I was ready to rationalize our way into proceeding around the sign, based on the theory that it will be open anyway in a few months, so we were just a bit early. I also felt justified because the BLM had behaved irresponsibly, labelling a trail as closed after miles of difficult driving, rather than at its entrance on the main road. On the other hand, I’m not surprised at this poor management, as the BLM is traditionally no friend of “Wilderness,” being forced to protect such areas by law, rather than by choice.

But in the end, I decided not to take the law into my own hands. As much as I wanted to see Keg Point, I wanted to visit here with a clear conscience, and I did not want to set an example for all the yahoos that might follow our tracks and truly destroy the terrain. Instead, I was able to talk our group into taking a little cross country hike, which I reasoned would be about two miles, to the narrow point of the Bowknot, for a 2-3 hour round trip walk. Even though it was again over 100°, since we had not yet hiked this trip, people were reasonably gung ho for an opportunity to spend time on their feet. My problem was that, since I did not know our exact position, a distance or time estimate was very approximate. I reasoned that it would be an easy hike, though, because we would just follow the old 4WD trail.

It took us a long time to put on our hiking boots and get our packs ready. We each took around a gallon of water, one liter in a hard water bottle and the rest in a soft bladder in our backpacks, a few items of clothing in case a storm hit us, and trail food. Setting out on the old 4WD trail beyond the sign, I was particularly pleased that I did not attempt to drive around the post, because every few hundred feet for the next half mile the BLM had placed large trees or boulders to block the path. One would have to be truly determined to get around all these. Nonetheless, we saw occasional tracks of dirt bikes or ATVs that circumvented these obstacles.

Following the 4WD trail on foot was no easier than following it on jeep—we lost it completely within a half mile. Lou thought he saw signs of it in a direction toward a canyon a quarter mile to our right, but it was debatably a trail. For the next hour, we walked cross country on beautiful white rolling sandstone hills up to 100 feet high near the rim of a canyon (which I since have decided was Horseshoe Canyon), skirting around some, up and over others, looking for something that I could recognize on the map. In one area we came to the three biggest potholes I have ever seen: 40 feet deep, and 15 feet wide. Two of them had dirty pools in their bottoms while the other had dry mud. There was no way in and no way out, except with a rope. Much of the sandstone in this area had beautiful monster swirls in multiple shades from white to orange.

I knew the general direction we were headed, but I could not make out our location, even after walking to the top of a high hill and looking around. In the distance I could see Labyrinth Canyon but that didn’t help. The main question was whether to turn right and head toward the canyon, looking for the peninsula that would take us out to the Bowknot, or whether to proceed parallel to the canyon for a while longer. My fear was that we would go too far and miss the ideal spot to turn. Eventually we turned toward the canyon where it seemed to make a large curve to the right, and soon we came to the edge of a shallow depression a half mile across. I reasoned we needed to go straight across to the other side, but Chris talked us into staying to the right closer to the canyon, because he though he saw a point at the end. Some of us walked high on the rocks on the right side of the valley, while others took the easier route in the depression.

We eventually came to a point overlooking Labyrinth Canyon at its intersection with a short but deep and wide side canyon. Here I finally figured out our location: it was a small point more than a mile before the Bowknot, next to a little canyon immediately north of Twomile Canyon. We would have been better off going across the valley as I originally suggested, as proceeding from here would require considerable backtracking. About two hours had passed by now, and people were too tired (from the heat, more than the exertion) to proceed yet another mile, so we decided to call it quits and head back. Chalk up Keg Point and the Bowknot as yet another destination for a future Greenshit expedition.

We hiked back to the jeeps by mid afternoon without incident, and then decided to look for a campsite with a view. Almost immediately after we turned around, we found the jeep trail that we had missed on the way in, and again there was a sign post in the middle, blocking the trail and facing the other way, indicating that we were already in the WSA. Fortunately this sign was easy to bypass on the way out. We decided to drive back to the side trail we had seen earlier by the drill hole, as it might take us close to a canyon overlook even if we could not get to the main Keg Point. The side trail soon came to a fork: the left fork was marked “no vehicles” as before, which did not concern us since it was impassable anyway, and the right fork was simply marked “stay on established trail.” I was relieved that they kept at least one open corridor. We drove this right fork for about two miles as it traversed the side of a wide valley to the south, half way up the side. With no warning, this trail ended, too, at a sign marked “no vehicles.” I was a getting upset, not because of the closures themselves but because they weren’t posted until the bitter end. It was clear now that there would be no way for us to drive to any of the fantastic lookouts of Keg Point or Horseshoe Canyon.

Since I always keep an eagle eye out for campsites, I recalled passing a decent spot with a large flat area, possible shade, and nice view of the valley, a couple miles back near the start of this spur. When we returned to that point the shade was not so great, but the slickrock area overlooking the valley was a perfect campsite, so we parked the jeeps and set up camp. I believe that The Rincon was in the distance at the far side of the valley, but our view of the canyon from here was too oblique to see it. A rincon is an abandoned meander that leaves a dry, semicircular canyon with a butte in the center. In the midwest where rivers don’t cut canyons, abandoned meanders become oxbow lakes. Out here, the rincon stays high and dry while the river continues to cut its main canyon, so that the bottom of the rincon may be hundreds of feet above the river. It is pretty clear that some day, Bowknot Bend will be a huge rincon.

While we set up camp several storms brewed in the distance. Today, Ed broke out his bottle of Lagavulin, a $40 single malt Scotch from the Isle of Islay, that he brought from New Hampshire. One of the storms with lightning and thunder appeared to be heading, very slowly, directly toward us, and it was not simply virga. I decided to wait out the storm with my camera and a beer under an overhung rock nearby. Mark joined me, bringing us a couple of shots of Lagavulin. Finally, after 6 days of anticipation, we got rain. Mark and I stayed dry under the rock, enjoying the storm and taking pictures of the others standing in the rain and sitting in the jeeps. The storm’s wind and thunder persisted for a long time but the downpour was only a few minutes. Afterwards it was apparent that those who got wet enjoyed the storm as much as Mark and me.

After dinner, Chris brought out a surprise: six exquisite Macanudo cigars: Portofinos in metal tubes. Only Mark is a habitual smoker, but we all appreciated a good stogie, except for Ed who couldn’t bring himself to break his nonsmoking habit. The rest of us were in heaven as we relaxed in our lounge chairs, feet up, puffing away on our cigars while sipping Lagavulin, soaking up the intense magenta sunset, mesmerized by the glowing orange cliffs against the stormy sky.

Tonight the moon rose at dusk. Just before bed, I took a picture of Chris holding the full moon in his hand as it emerged over the buttes.