A Glen Canyon Odyssey

 
 

Hiking up and out of the canyon


For the first several miles routes up to the plateau above the river are plentiful.  But you are not likely to want to go there.  The living river is the wonder of upper Glen.  Farther downstream, routes to the rim get scarcer and scarcer.  Vertical canyon walls get more and more unbroken.  The historical sites are mostly close to the river: the Anasazi, the early Mormons, the rare settlers, even the placer miners, had the good sense to know where to leave their ruins.  Near water.  (Miners aren’t always so sensible: they find ores in the most miserable places.)  A road at The Rincon tempts exploration, but the river tempts more.  Hole-in-the-Rock “road” from the rim to the river is a must, if you didn’t come in that way: now there is a piece of fascinating history.

In the lower Glen any route to the rim is worth the effort.  There, the routes are rare, because the walls are everywhere.  Giant walls.  Exquisitely decorated walls.  You see the Navajo rug patterns in those walls.  You see canyon walls of beauty and grandeur found in no other canyon in the world.  (Grand Canyon is ruggeder and grander–bigger–but not with Glen’s beauty and graceful grandeur; the sumo wrestler and the ballerina).  And  “you learned to perceive, not to preconceive, what makes a land beautiful,” as Dave Brower wrote, because you cannot preconceive: nothing matches Glen’s grandeur.  So you climb up those walls every chance you get.  You cannot elsewhere see anything similar to what you see from there, up high in Glen.  You are up close to heavenly grandeur.  You experience grace and grandeur, beauty and sensuality, unrivaled anywhere else on Earth.  (But don’t get carried away and forget to carry water.)

The sheep trail below the mouth of Driftwood Canyon.  The Escalante water gauging station route near the Hole-in-the-Rock air strip.  Numerous pecked paths on the Navajo side of lower Glen.  And some of the side canyons allowed you to hike up to where the side canyons became uninteresting and so afforded routes over to the rim.  That was often about 3710’ elevation (Glen Canyon dam spillway elevation).

 
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Our party of thirteen explorers had already diminished by one by the time we had reached Hole in the Rock.  (We had started by hiking down the Narrows of Zion.  One of our party had to get immediately to Colorado to take his bar exams–he actually left Zion a little early, and missed some of the best part of Zion because he offered to escort an injured hiker out in the dark to see a doctor.  Years later he got something of reputation for callousness, a fact that went against all I knew about him, he who once before had been one of only two people I could get from a large party to help search for another lost hiker–in a snow storm, after dark, and in high winds.  That lost person had simply taken shelter under a cabin and showed up the next morning.  Before we got back to camp, we three searchers had all broken through the thin ice on the edge of the lake and spent the evening drying out by the fire.)

From our adventures out at Hole-in-the-Rock, we went to the virtually unvisited Goblin Valley, the far back country of Arches National Monument, and the summit of Colorado's fourteen thousand foot plus Uncompahgre Peak.  All without incident; all with unforgettable experiences of scenic grandeur among the world's most startling land forms.

But this is only the beginning of the saga.  For this saga is not just a tale of lost and injured hikers.  That is only incidental.  This is about the most extraordinary place on the face of the Earth: Glen Canyon.