After ten days of staying off the beaten track in Arizona and Utah, I decided to make an exception and visit a few of the slot canyons for which this part of the country is justly famous. Like many other visitors to the Grand Staircase of the Escalante National Monument,I chose Dry Forks Coyote Gulch, a drainage in the southeast corner of the Monument, into which three slot canyons empty in rapid succession: Peekaboo, Spooky, and Brimstone.

Upstream of where the trail enters, Dry Gulch itself becomes a slot canyon that can be followed for miles. Anywhere else, it would be an attraction in its own right, but its easy, winding path pales in comparison to the drama of the serpentine, and sometimes almost impassable, corridors of its more famous tributary slots.

Although I had not seen a soul in a week of wanderings in the Escalante, there were already three vehicles at the trailhead when I arrived early in the morning; there were three more by the time I left. And no surprise, because each of the slot canyons that can be accessed less than a mile from the trailhead is spectacular in its own right.

Like most visitors, I scaled Peekaboo first. The canyon enters from the north, emerging as a narrow cleft ten feet up the stone wall of the main canyon. After clambering up (using handholds) the canyon wall, and then up and over a modest pouroff, you work your way gradually uphill for .25 miles, past fins, dry whirlpools and modest pouroffs, looking up on occasion through arches that span the narrow canyon. At times, you need not only all of your arms and legs, but your back (and some ingenuity) as well to span, brace and lift yourself up and over obstructions. Eventually you emerge into the gravelly wash above, from which it's less than a half-mile hike due east to reach the next wash, which almost immediately dives down into the bedrock to form Spooky - the second slot canyon.

You have been warned
Entire text of a sign on a Lake District mountain road

Safe backcountry driving is one part experience and three parts caution and good sense. If you exercise the latter, there's no reason to get into trouble while acquiring the former. In this installment I'll provide some rules to keep in mind to keep you out of trouble, as well as offer some practical driving tips for driving in the southwest. While I'm hardly an expert or professional driver, I have driven several thousand miles of unpaved backcountry roads over the past ten years, and pass along what I've observed in that time for you to test on your own.

The first thing to keep in mind is that once you leave a paved road, you should assume that you're on your own. Cell phones will rarely work, and the more isolated your destination, the less likely it is that anyone is going to happen by to help if you're stuck, broken down, or out of gas. As a result, it's up to you to avoid any of those things happening, and it's also up to you to make the type of preparations that will get you out of a fix if you end up in one anyway.

As you'd expect, paved roads don't often reach the places that are most off the beaten track.  Getting to the backcountry therefore means using the right tool for the job, which will often be a four-wheel drive vehicle.  This next set of blog entries is for those of you that have no experience with four-wheel driving on really lousy roads, but have a hankering to give it a try.  I'll start with some advice on choosing the right chariot for your adventure.

Not so very long ago, that would have been very simple, in the sense that you'd know exactly what to look for.  That's because there were only two choices:  Jeeps (as in the registered trademark vehicle, not in the generic way the term is sometimes used) and pickup trucks.  The former were built to go anywhere, with no compromises for comfort, and the latter were built to do heavy, high clearance work.  Finding a place that rented a Jeep might not be easy, but at least everyone knew what you were talking about.

Today, however, there are many different types of cars that do some, most, or all of the same jobs.  That's good, because the old Jeeps weren't built to carry much gear, and you don't always need a vehicle that can leap mountains in a single bound.  But it's bad in that the choices become more complicated, and it's therefore easier to end up with the wrong tool for the job.

We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.  I may never in my life get to Alaska,...but I am grateful that it is there.  We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope
                                                     Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

This morning I decided to forego my usual breakfast banquet of a stale donut with coffee and head into town for a more substantial repast, an uplink to the Internet, and a chance to ask a question or two about things I'd seen.  

On my way into town I heard part of a BBC broadcast focused on the perennial efforts of the current administration in Washington to open up the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration and production.  The panel comprised the expected mix: a Sierra Club representative, an advocate of drilling, and a third party presumed to occupy the middle ground.

There wasn't anything particularly new about the interchange, which was civil, although vigorous on both sides.  What struck me, as always, was the impassioned view of the industry advocate that we must begin exploitation in Alaska now because conservation efforts require too much time to take effect — an argument I have heard for so long that such efforts could easily have taken hold many times over ever since first this rationale was raised.

I was also struck by the fact that no one mentioned the amount of time it would take to explore, extract, and build transshipment facilities (pipelines?  A port terminal with the capacity to store hundreds of millions of gallons of crude until ships can collect it during ice-out in summer?)  Could actually bringing Alaskan Wildlife Refuge oil into the Lower Forty Eight conceivably take less than a decade?

When I was younger, backpacking seemed like the obvious way to go about seeing what was worth seeing in the out of doors.  Back east, where I grew up, as a generality backpacking was a requirement as well, if you wanted to thin the ranks of the hordes of co-eco-religionists seeking the same Appalachian, Adirondack or White Mountain High.  But beyond this sort of practicality, there has long seemed to be a sort of macho charisma that attaches to backpacking, a sense that there is something inherently righteous about disappearing into the bush with naught to sustain you but what you lug in under your own steam.  

As I've grown older, though, I've realized that lugging fifty pounds of food and equipment (or more) on my back may sometimes be a necessary evil to reach certain objectives, but it is hardly to be considered an end in itself by any sane person.  As a result, car camping has held increasing appeal to me, and my last backpacking excursion is now four years in the past.  At the same time, my time spent hiking has increased rather than diminished.  Better yet, my enjoyment has increased significantly, as has the variety of what I have seen while trekking about in a state of only lightly encumbered bliss.

Is car camping some sort of modern, comfort driven cop out?  Not withstanding the cachet that backpacking still enjoys, I don't think so.  After all, the west was hardly opened by pioneers with ultralight backpacks and high tech tents, but by settlers perfectly happy to sit in Conestoga wagons and let the oxen do the walking, and by prospectors with their donkeys and their mules to tote their gear. Similarly, the way to move your stock up into high meadows in the early summer and back in the fall was on horseback (and in some places, still is), with a packhorse for gear.  In short, until recently no self-respecting westerner would dream of walking if s/he could ride — so why should we, even if packhorses have now become a less available option?

Although a dozen miles at most separate the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument from the Kaibab National Forest to the south, the two environments are as different as can be imagined (my posts on the Kaibab can be found here , here  and here).  Several thousand feet lower and far dryer, the Escalante is a void of shattered rock, high mesas, endless canyons, and seemingly infinite aridity, but for the thunderstorms that hover motionless in the afternoons of summer over one part of the landscape or another for hours at a time.  More often than not, these showy storms simply tease with thunder, lightning and a quick shower or a spattering of raindrops, but sometimes they unleash a deluge that leads (as yesterday) to flash floods.

This difference in climate makes accessing the Escalante a far different proposition for a visitor than the Kaibab.  While the Kaibab Plateau supports an active lumbering and "wildlife management" economy for those that live around it, and therefore has hundreds of miles of well maintained dirt roads, the Escalante has no trees to harvest, and only marginal ranching opportunities through much of its range.  Unlike almost all government land in the West (other than National Parks), there are large areas of the Escalante where there is no evidence (think hard what that might be) of any cattle at all.

As a result, no paved roads cross the sixty mile wide Monument, and huge areas of the Escalante have no dirt roads, or miracle of miracles, even jeep or ATV tracks at all.  As I sit here typing today, I'm parked on a rock ledge next to one of the few rough dirt roads for many miles around, overlooking a dry canyon to the south, and overlooked in turn by a massive, unvegetated mesa to the north.  The "road" I traveled for the last two hours simply follows the dry floor of a narrow wash for most of its length.  I can know almost to a certainty that I will see neither another car nor a soul (bovine or human) for as long as I choose to stay somewhere along this road's length — or the next.  For that matter, I am likely the only person within 10 to 25 miles in any direction.  Only a single old ATV track is visible.