Day 9: July 14 Friday — Maze Overlook Layover

Highlights: Drying out; dew; jackrabbit; hike into Maze; beers in spring; Harvest Scene pictographs; hike to Chocolate Drops; threatening storm.

We awoke to a crystal clear morning at a temperature of 58°, which was to tie for the coldest of the trip. A brilliant sun rose over the La Sal mountains, bathing us in welcome radiation. The humidity was in the 90’s and everything outside was just as soaked as the night before, but items in the tents were beginning to dry. Things outside were wet, not because of the rain, but because it was below the dew point. Here was another Greenshit first: morning dew in the desert.

Finally we had a chance to enjoy one of the most marvelous views in Canyon Country. Perched on the edge of this cliff overlooking the Maze we could see to the east and south for a hundred miles, to the La Sal and Abajo Mountains and even to some mountains in Colorado. The Maze below us consists of an incredibly twisty maze of canyons covering an area about 50 square miles. The bottoms of the canyons are about 600′ below, and the reason it is a maze is because it is a jumbled mess. You can’t make out the logic of the connecting canyons either from our vantage point on top or when you’re in it below. The topo map looks like a bowl of spaghetti.

The Maze does have a logic to it: there are three or four main canyons, parallel to each other that merge in the north. Each of these canyons has side canyons with smaller side canyons with yet smaller side canyons, until there is very little “land” left that isn’t part of a canyon. The canyons are all the same depth and differ only in width, so it’s hard to tell which is the “main” canyon and which is a “side.” Without studying the map, it’s also impossible to tell which way in a canyon is downstream. The land that remains between the canyons forms the inverse of the canyons: several main ridges with smaller side branches with yet smaller side branches. The tops of the ridges rise about 450′ above the canyon bottoms, having been eroded from their original 600′ height at the level of the plateau on which we’re standing.

There is one anomaly in the structure of these ridges that makes the view even more remarkable, the Chocolate Drops: a row of four fins of varying widths sticking 120′ straight up from the top of the ridge directly across from our campsite. Their tops are level with the campsite, but higher than any other part of the Maze. The fins are made of deep red brown sandstone with a hard cap of White Rim sandstone. In the distance beyond the Maze are many more pinnacles, walls and buttes rising majestically above flat plains. One spire, which we called the Palm Tree, is incredibly thin and crooked, topped by a large balanced rock. That area is the Land of Standing Rocks which we will see tomorrow on our way to the next campsite.

A few hundred yards to the north, along the solid White Rim sandstone where we were standing, the rim breaks up into a series of “walking rocks”: four pinnacles of White Rim rock on top of red sandstone spires. The rocks are as big as rooms, separated by small gaps that make perfect jumpers. This landmark is Brimhall Point, visible for miles in the Maze area.

Today was to be our first day of “rest,” in that we didn’t have to pack up camp. For once, we had a truly leisurely breakfast.

It was a good morning to take care of various odds and ends. We sacrificed some of our water to partially clean the inches of caked mud off the jeeps. Pequod’s custom console between the bucket seats, which consisted of a cardboard box, had nearly dissolved in last night’s rain. Without a console, our state of disorganization would have become critical. Copious quantities of duct tape saved the day.

Later in the morning a jackrabbit visited. It was not exactly tame, but did not flee immediately as I approached, so I was able to get close-up videos. I imagine it was used to campers at this site.

I knew of several interesting day trips from here: you can hike down into the Maze to experience the canyons from inside and see some Indian pictographs, you can drive all the way to Anderson Bottom and go swimming in the river, or you can drive part of the way as either a sightseeing trip or to a hike into a beautiful slot canyon near the mouth of Millard Canyon.

We decided to see the Maze and pictographs—usually a modest day hike of five or six hours. We hung up all our items that we wanted to dry and loaded our packs with water and supplies for the day. By the time we were ready to go at 10:30 a.m., nearly everything was dry. Before leaving it was most important to batten down everything that could blow away. Even though the air was calm now, strong winds almost always pick up in the afternoon. In Greenshit ’94 we came close to losing a sleeping bag off the cliff: we found its ground cloth wrapped around a bush within five feet of the rim.

The Maze Overlook Trail zigzags its way down into the first Maze canyon immediately below us and travels along the bottom to the next canyon behind the Chocolate Drops where the pictographs are. The trailhead, a five-minute walk from the campsite, begins as a precipitous drop over a ten-foot ledge and then descends to a traverse 100′ below the rim, immediately under the imposing pinnacles of Brimhall Point. The foot trail, amazingly labeled a “pack trail” on the topo maps, is to normal hiking trails as 4WD trails are to superhighways. While not, strictly, a technical climb, it is not for the weak or fainthearted. It is very well-marked with cairns, but even so, a first timer might refuse to believe that this trail goes where it does. It requires all kinds of rock climbing maneuvers such as chimneying and laybacks, with considerable exposure and opportunities for instant death. The first person down, whose job it is to point out the obscure handholds and footholds to the others, needs to be skilled and fearless.

Which is why I was thoroughly flabbergasted when Lou took up the lead and remained there for the entire 90-minute climb to the bottom. I knew Lou was fearless, ever since he did the famous jumper of Greenshit ’89, but I had no idea he had the skill to lead this trail. Some of us with more rock climbing experience than Lou had a hard time on some moves, even while being guided down, yet Lou did it alone, with no complaints and not a bit of help.

However, Lou’s directions as a leader leave something to be desired. While Ed was clinging to a wall ten feet off the ground, holding on for dear life with the tips of his fingers and toes, Lou tried to guide him down. “Move your foot to the left…No, left!… LEFT!…I mean right!”

One interesting feature of this trail are the moki steps carved into the solid sandstone over sections that would be impossible without a rope. I don’t think they were really created by the Moki Indians whom I believe didn’t even inhabit this area. Moki step is just a name for any carved step that resembles those that the Mokis made to get to their cliff dwellings.

At the bottom of the climb we were at the bottom of the canyon with the walls looming nearly straight up. The canyon is about a thousand feet across at the top and the main wash meanders within it along the flat bottom a couple hundred feet wide. First we turned right for a 5-minute walk to a spring consisting of water seeping up from the ground and forming a pool that extends for several hundred feet along the wash. The entire length of the pool is under a cool overhang in a little canyon within the big canyon. The area around the pool, and a good distance on either side, is covered with very tall, dense grass, reeds, and other wetland plants, all shaded by abundant cottonwoods.

One thing that surprised me was the lack of bugs. There are always bugs in the bottoms of wet washes, even in normal years. Deer flies that interminably buzz around your head and bite behind the knees are especially obnoxious. With the record number of bugs that had plagued us so far this trip, I expected the worst. But here we didn’t see a single gnat or mosquito. Did they drown in the storm last night?

Another wonderful aspect of this day so far is the lack of heat. For the first time this trip, it was not even 90° at noon, yet the sky was a crystal clear deep blue. Under normal conditions, we would be dousing our heads with cold water from the spring while relaxing in the shade of the overhang. Today all we did was admire the scene and place our beers, one each, into the water to keep them cold for later. I would be disappointed to come to Utah in the summer and not experience 100° temperatures, but even I though it was nice to have a relatively cool day for a change.

We turned around at the spring to head in the opposite direction down the trail. The hike to the pictographs was an easy one hour walk on the bottom of the wash, past several intersecting side canyons that looked exactly like the one we were in. If you are not familiar with this place and you lose track of your position on the topo map, you would have an impossible time finding it again. It is necessary to follow every little undulation of the canyon walls on the map as you go. God forbid if you lose your map and forget which turns you took, because you could walk miles down the wrong canyon and not notice it wasn’t the right one.

The large cottonwoods growing in the wash all had high piles of debris wrapped around the base of their trunks, as if the water had been ten feet deep, possibly as recently as yesterday’s storm. Someone made a useful observation: the angle of this debris tells you which way is downstream.

Near the intersection of canyons that leads to the pictographs, my topo map indicated a natural bridge about halfway up a side canyon wall. I had looked for this bridge on previous trips but never found it. This time, Terry, who is an arch fanatic, accompanied me on a little climb partially up the opposite wall of that side canyon to a likely lookout, and there it was, high up on the wall, spanning a dry cascade that empties into the main canyon. While the terminology of desert formations is a little vague, a natural bridge differs from an arch in that a bridge spans a current or former watercourse, formed when the water tunnels its way through a wall, while arches form by erosion from rain above and wind blowing through them. In time the rock around the tunnel wears away, from the water in the wash as well as the wind and rain, so that it looks more like a bridge than a tunnel. Natural bridges are rare compared to arches.

A few minutes from the bridge we arrived at the Harvest Scene Pictographs, one of the finest examples of Anasazi pictographs in Canyon Country. For the first timer, they may not seem like much: faint, crude paintings of people and animals on the smooth sandstone wall of the canyon. But they are quite extensive, many larger-than-life figures along several hundred feet of canyon wall. They are faint now, after a thousand years, but were surely bright and glorious at one time. One of the main figures in the center is wearing a multicolored striped tunic. It is possible to walk along a ledge about ten feet off the ground right next to them, but of course touching them is a crime punishable by hanging. Because it is so easy to get close, they would have been gone by now if they were not in such a remote area.

The lighting for the pictographs, with the sun shining on them, is always terrible in the afternoon when people usually get here, but we took what pictures we could and then discussed lunch. We decided to walk back and stop at the first shady spot. The temperature was probably only a little above 90°—not very warm—but as memory of last night’s storm faded, we got back into the habit of avoiding the sun where possible.

At lunch under a cottonwood I offered the challenge of climbing to the top of the ridge at the base of the Chocolate Drops. This had been a goal of mine since Greenshit #1, but I could never get other people enthused about it. Today I managed to talk Chris and Mark into it, probably by making them feel guilty, as I’m pretty sure they were reluctant. The Chocolate Drop trail departed from the trail we were on just beyond the lunch spot, down a short side canyon that appeared to end with vertical walls on all sides. The trail is marked on the map, but I was not mollified that it was also labelled a “pack trail.” We said good-bye to the others and almost immediately began climbing. The others continued on the main trail toward the Maze Overlook—after his outstanding performance on the descent, I was confident Lou could lead them up without my help.

Thankfully, the trail to the Chocolate Drops was cairned—I was not in the mood to blaze a route up the canyon wall. However the cairns were few and far between. As we gained altitude and dangerous exposure, I began to worry about losing the trail. I also worried about getting back down, as some of the climbs were tricky, worse than the Maze Overlook Trail. Semi-lost most of the time, we ran into a number of dead ends and false leads. The cairns appeared to be for the benefit of the downhill climber. Going up, we could not see over the next ledge until we climbed onto it, often to realize it was not the trail. Against the instructions of the ranger not to disturb or build cairns, we built more cairns at spots where we knew we were on the trail so as to assure our way back.

In about two hours of moderately difficult, but interesting, climbing, the four Chocolate Drops suddenly appeared in front of us. They were truly massive and incredibly thin for their size: 120′ high but only 15′ thick. We easily walked the last few hundred feet to their base, and then onto the crest of the ridge between the first two pinnacles. With these huge monoliths towering over us we felt like insignificant pebbles, ready and willing to be crushed by the fall of the massive white caprock, toppled by the next gust of wind.

From here we could see for the first time across the canyon to our campsite a half mile away on the opposite rim. Since the caps of the Chocolate Drops are level with that rim and we were at the base of the drops, the rim blocked our view of the land to the west, but we could barely make out our jeeps parked near the lip. While admiring the view Chris heard a voice across the canyon. It was the other group, somewhere on the Maze Overlook climb back to the campsite. The acoustics here were incredible, as it was possible to carry on a conversation with the others at a half mile. They could see us easily, because we purposely silhouetted ourselves on the ridge against the sky, but we saw nothing against the complex backdrop of the opposite canyon wall, even after they described their position as half way up in the white sandstone layer. We were talking to the wall of a canyon and it was answering back.

But suddenly we saw a flash, and then another in the same place. Someone was using their signal mirror. We could not make out the individual people or what they were doing, but we could see some flecks at the source of the flash. Even after we knew their exact position, it was impossible for us to tell it was people and not random speckles on the rocks. Later I calculated that a sitting person at that distance subtends an angle of four minutes of arc, which is just an eighth the size of the moon, not far from the limits of eyeball resolution.

An interesting aspect of the conversation across the canyon was something I had only experienced on satellite phone calls: the dreaded two-second delay. But in this case, it was closer to five seconds, and caused by the speed of sound, not light.

But even more interesting was the fact that a menacing wall of clouds was rapidly approaching from the west. The other guys knew this, too, and warned us from across the canyon. We decided it was not wise to linger here, so we said our good-byes, had some last bites of energy food, and hurried down. The black cloud covered the sun within a few minutes, and soon we heard thunder and lightning. This storm business was getting tedious.

It had taken us two hours to get up to the Chocolate Drops, and I expected that returning would be a lot slower since it was all down-climbing. Plus, I knew that there would be times when we’d lose the trail because we did not judiciously build cairns at every confusing turn. The storm was not going to wait for two hours, and the thought of down-climbing in driving rain terrified me.

We practically ran on the parts of the trail where you could walk, and slid down on spots you needed to climb. I was amazed how quickly we negotiated moves that I thought were hard. We were clearly egged on by the ominous darkness and thunder reverberating in the canyons, rattling our bones, but gravity also helped on climbs that had few handholds. We had only one difficult time, trying to find our way off a long ledge when we couldn’t remember where we came up.

We reached the bottom in what must be a Canyonlands record: 30 minutes, and it had not yet started to rain. I was so relieved that I almost wished it would start pouring now, a wall of water flooding the canyon, because nothing can be worse than climbing down that trail in the rain. Even though the Maze Overlook Trail with its exposed slickrock climbs could also be dangerous when wet, it was familiar to me and I felt that we could make it up regardless of conditions. While we walked back down the wash, the rain started and we put on our raincoats, with thunder continuing to echo in the canyons.

But, alas, once again, we were only moistened by a handful of drops before it subsided. I felt ridiculous sweating in my raincoat. That was the last we were to see of water from the sky on this expedition.

By the time we reached the base of the climb up to Maze Overlook, it was evident that the storm just missed us. We heard more thunder and the sky was still black, but the worst part of the storm was moving away. From the bottom we could look up to see the other guys standing on the lip at the campsite. We could talk to them and see their silhouettes, but I could not determine that Lou was naked. (We later learned he was drying off after a shower.)

Before returning we bypassed the climb to retrieve our beers lying in the spring. Mark was surprised that even during the most threatening moments of the storm I was determined to get those beers, but you have to get your priorities right. Surprisingly, the beers did not seem cold. Perhaps this was because the air had cooled down a lot and it was not such a hot day anyway. Granted, the water was probably never below 75° in the first place, but I still expected it to feel colder. Nevertheless, we enjoyed our lukewarm beers.

We returned to the trail and Chris dashed ahead of us, making it up to the campsite in 35 minutes, while Mark and I spent an hour strolling leisurely, occasionally chatting to the people on top as we climbed. Back at camp we had truly cold beers, the sun came out, and it promised to be a nice evening. It was still fairly early and there were still no bugs. We had our showers, Putenesca for dinner, and we shot pictures of a nice sunset. The stars and milky way were exceptional early tonight before the moon came up. The darkness enabled me to illuminate the Chocolate Drops with my laser pointer, although I couldn’t convince everyone of this.