Canyonlands

From Salt Lake we headed 6 hours south to the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. We picked up our backcountry permit and headed to Hamburger Rock, a BLM campground just outside of the park.  This campsite had the most spectacular stargazing we’ve ever seen.  There were no city lights for at least 50 miles, we had a new moon, and the Orionid meteor shower gave us at least a dozen shooting stars.  (A fellow camper, Jeff from Boston, gave the campground an informal astronomy talk that evening.)   In the middle of the night the winds kicked up and showered us with sand while we were trying to sleep in the tent. We awoke to a fine red sandy grit covering everything!

We hadn’t been backpacking since our Maroon Bells trip in September, so we were anxious to do another backpacking trip in the desert. We decided on a three-day trip into the Needles district. Hiking in Canyonlands was a new experience. The majority of the trail was on slickrock hiking from cairns to cairns or in sand and loose rock on a river bed. The cairns were essential to route finding as the landscape looked so similar in some places that it’s easy to see how someone could get lost.

The weather was perfect - sunny and warm with highs in the high 70s and overnight lows in the 40s. Our first night we spent in the Chesler Park area with sweeping views of the skyline, huge pillars/needles in clusters and grass land surrounding us.

Our first campsite didn’t have any water, so we carried extra water in and hoped that we found water on the second day (which we did). The route for the second day brought us around the needles, up and down/ in and out of canyons, and at times we had to climb ladders to scale the rock. At the second campsite in the Lost Canyon area we were tucked in a canyon, which meant we lost the sun early that day. In the Lost Canyon area it felt more lush with yellow cottonwoods but water was still scarce. In total we hiked about 20 miles over 3 days and of course had a ton of fun together!

When we got back to the car (and after enjoying an Izze and a homemade chocolate chip cookie) we decided that we should drive half way to our next destination, Capitol Reef National Park. We finally found a place to pitch the tent in a deserted campground near Lake Powell.