Burr Trail
This day didn't start out so well. Well at first it did - I was camping last night and got up early (6:50am), so I thought, great, I can get an early start. While having coffee at the cafe this morning and checking my email and posting here, I decided to look to see if I could find a place that rented cabins near Capitol Reef NP. Well, I found one, Sand Creek RV Park, and so I decided to call them. So...I look for my phone and don't find it anywhere. I searched all my bags and on the floor of my car. I took EVERYTHING out of my car and still no phone. I search all my backpacks again. Nothing. I borrow the phone at Escalante Outfitters and call Virgin Mobile and have them shut off the service my cell phone because it's missing. So I wasted almost 1.5 hours on it this morning. I drive to the petrified forest and am loading up my hiking backpack and lo and behold, hiding behind a chocolate bar is my phone! I had looked in that pack several times and somehow did not see the chocolate bar or the phone! How stupid did I feel? I guess I should have turned my pack upside down and shook it. Well, I had my phone service restored and all is good now, but that was scary. Yes, I have a code lock on it, but I can just imagine if someone figured that out and started using the data roaming. Yikes! Scary thought.
Petrified Log
After the petrified forest hike, I headed over to the Burr Trail which you access at the town of Boulder, UT. It winds down a red canyon with juniper trees perched here and there, big red and golden walls with huge flakes cut into the stone. Hopefully a flake doesn't fall when I'm driving by. I was here in 2005 also and remembered the short slot canyon about half way through. I walked throug it again. It's very wide, unlike spooky was yesterday, and very short.
I end up eventually at an overlook and go past it a bit to see a sign for several destinations down a dirt road. I look up in my book I bought on photographing the southwest and one of the options is Death Hollow which is a cool slot canyon. It's 7 miles long and has very technical parts, but the beginning is not technical and you can hike it for a while. It's 13 miles down the road says the sign. But the book says 5 miles to Horse Canyon and THEN 13 more miles after that. Hmmm. I start down the road and get to Horse Canyon and decide not to proceed. The road is fine, but I just think it's getting late and I wanted to get to my cabin in Torrey before dark. So I eat lunch in Horse Canyon and I have the place to myself (there's a trail head there but no one is there - much less popular than Spooky Canyon). But there are some cool canyon walls and an awesome tree, so it's not a bad place to be. I pull out the viola and play a few songs. Good, it survived the cold night last night. It was in the upper 20s - kind of cold for my poor musical instruments left in the car. This is the main reason I opted not to camp again tonight (although it IS nice for me not to be cold too). I got a cabin for $30 with heat! Hey that's cheaper than camping in a CA state park (which is $35 now).
Horse Canyon
Awesome Tree in Horse Canyon
So no slot canyon today, but hopefully tomorrow I'll get to Little Wild Horse Slot Canyon after my visit to the Goblin Valley. If I have time I'll hit those after Capitol Reef which is first, but if I stay all day in Capitol Reef, I think I'll head to Goblin the next day instead.
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