Capitol Reef

 I'm sitting here surrounded by sandstone hills at Santhrax site off UT-95 with coffee and laptop at 7AM typing away, still fresh after hiking Escalante and Capitol Reef. I can peak at Henry Mountains to the West in the direction where UT-95 will take you back to Capitol Reef and Escalante. This is turning into a trip of lifetime.

You think of Utah, you think of desertscape. Or flat salt lake. At best, the bare-looking Wasatch Mountains around Provo is what you think of. But parts of Utah is incredibly lush. Colob Terrace north of Zion on the way to Cedar City was like that. Boulder Mountain is even more so.

But you have to pass through some incredible desertscape to get there. Follow UT-12 from Escalante to Torrey and you will know why UT-12 is famous. Before you get to Hog Back Ridge which everybody should drive on at least once in their life, you can look West past the vast sandstone field toward Boulder Mountain and Henry Mountains.

By the time you reach the town of Boulder, the white and orange sandstones give way to greenery. It's a beautiful ranch town surrounded by red rocks and forested hills. Imagine smaller Sedona with more greens. And it's greener because the lush Boulder Mountain starts from there. 

From there, you climb up following UT-12. By the time you get to the peak, the temperature drops into the 50s. A hailstorm must've passed through when I was there. The ground was covered was thick blanket of hails making the drivng treacherous. 15 mph was all I could muster without risking sliding off the side of the mountain. As I descended, the temperature dropped further into low 50s, perhaps because of the weather: I was following the storm.

Just when I got off the mountain and thought I was out of the hails, a incredible storm hit. My wiper ran at full speed and I still couldn't see through the windshield. This time my speed went down to 10 mph. It went on like that for about 20 minutes till I finally got to the town of Torrey.

Torrey must be bigger than Escalante -- it has Subway Sandwich just as you enter the town at the end of UT-12. I wasn't going to cook for dinner since I was sleeping in the car, so I grabbed a foot long sub and went up UT-24 looking for the camping site. There was no Bea's Lewis Road at the GPS coordinate. But there was a short dirt road leading to a wash. I went into it, parked and spent the night there.

My plan has changed since I spent extra 2 nights in Escalante tending the fridge business. Instead of camping 3 nights in Torrey, I'm sleeping in the car for one night and moving on toward Monticello. I'm doing Capitol Reef on the way. That way, I don't have to come back to Torrey and therefore save the EV juice. It's 180 miles to the next Supercharger in Blanding and I need to conserve every electrons as I can.

It's an ambitious plan. I've done Calf Creek Falls the day before and it was a bit more than I planned. It wasn't strenuous, but it was 5.7 miles long. And I did it almost without stopping other than 1 hour break at the fall itself. Doing Grand Wash meant that I'd be doing two 5+ mile hikes in 2 days in a row. But I'll be mostly driving the next day and I'll have a full day of rest once I get to Blue Mountain in Monticello.

Where should I begin? Let me just say that Grand Wash was spectacular as any canyon I've seen so far. It's a part Yosemite and a part Zion Canyon. Imagine Zion Narrows, make it a little wider in the middle and opening up at the either ends in an hourglass shape. As you enter and exit the narrow, the view of towering cliffs is reminiscent of Yosemite except that they are made of sandstone rather than granite. Inside the narrows, it is Zion except that you are wading in mud and gravel rather than water. 

It's a greatest hike you've never heard of. Why, I've never even heard of Capitol Reef till I started researching for this trip. It is a totally underated and you should do it at least once in your life. It is about as long and strenuous as Calf Creek Falls. The sun was also as hot as you enter and exit the narrows. But it was cool in shade inside the narrows.

I was done before 3PM. I had less than 100 miles to go this day, so I had plenty of time. The first order of business was to stop at Hanksville, have early dinner, plug in the car in their RV site and fix the fridge problem.