Packrafting Utah's Escalante River in Late March

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I am embarrassed to admit that, after several years of living in Utah, dozens of weeks spent in the western desert, and many nights dreaming away under a shelter slung between two juniper trees, I somehow managed to avoid reading Edward Abbey's classic work, Desert Solitaire. That is, until a few weeks ago when, upon learning this fact, a friend demanded that I correct this travesty and made sure a copy found its way into my hands. As I lay in bed one February night in Montana, I began to read:

Off in the east an isolated storm is boiling over the desert, a mass of lavender clouds bombarding the earth with lightning and trailing curtains of rain. The distance is so great that I cannot hear the thunder. Between here and there and me and the mountains it's the canyon wilderness, the hoodoo land of spire and pillar and pinnacle where no man lives, and where the river flows, unseen, through the blue-black trenches in the rock.

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# PHOTOS: 10

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Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)

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Jun 2, 2009 at 6:15 pm #1236760

Addie Bedford
BPL Member

@addiebedford
Locale: Montana

Companion forum thread to:

Packrafting Utah's Escalante River in Late March

Jun 2, 2009 at 7:52 pm #1505419

Richard Nisley
BPL Member

@richard295
Locale: San Francisco Bay Area

Cool trip… thanks for sharing.

Jun 3, 2009 at 1:23 am #1505467

Julian Watson
Member

@juleswatson

Looks great, nice trip. I'm pretty sure the sandstone hollows are formed due to wind processes.

Jun 3, 2009 at 1:25 am #1505468

Charles Reneau
Member

@charley289
Locale: Cascades and Oregon Coast Range

Awesome report!!! I'm officially saving up for an Alpacka as of right now. . . the kayak can wait.
Charley

Jun 3, 2009 at 6:08 am #1505481

Larry Tullis
BPL Member

@larrytullis
Locale: Wasatch Mountains

That is a float I've always wanted to do, all the way to Lake Powell. Another option, that I have done, is I hiked up from the highway bridge and fished and explored my way up Sand Creek, which drains the Boulder Mountains plateau (also great hiking and fishing). There are lots of ancient american dwellings to gaze upon and abundant scenery to create much awe. The sight of a brown trout rising to a dry fly at the base of a 1000 foot red cliff is something that is etched on the mind of this flyfishing fool. Other side canyons like Calf Creek (a fun hike with much photographed Calf creek falls) also have good fishing.

Jun 3, 2009 at 8:54 am #1505519

Sam Haraldson
BPL Member

@sharalds
Locale: Gallatin Range

Bill,

You have a way with words. And just how you managed to make references to Desert Solitaire and Back to the Future in the same article is beyond me – – but it worked!

One of your chosen passages from Desert Solitaire hit home especially well with me as it's my favorite quote from the book:

…Anything rather than confront directly the antehuman, that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse – its implacable indifference.

Jun 3, 2009 at 3:09 pm #1505613

Amy Lauterbach
BPL Member

@drongobird
Locale: San Francisco Bay Area

Bill – Very nice article and photos. Thanks for taking the time to share.

We recently hiked the Escalante River from town to the backed up Reservoir waters and had a terrific trip. Very special place.

For those interested in helping to make sure this river and its environs stay healthy, there are three efforts worth mentioning…
1. Bill Wolverton and others are doing heroic work to eradicate Russian Olive from the river corridor, including the entire stretch from Egypt to Coyote. Bill has been at it for ~10 years, working on his own, and hosting volunteer groups.
http://www.math.utah.edu/~sfolias/canyontales/wolverton/articles.php

2. GrandCanyonTrust.org acquired the grazing leases in the area featured on this packraft trip and removed the cows. The canyon floors are now free of cow dung and the willows are recovering. Vegetation in the canyon bottoms is noticeably different than it was 25 years ago, however there are still cows grazing upriver from ~Choprock.

3. SUWA.org is steadily and relentlessly working for protection of the southern utah roadless areas.

– AmyL

Jun 3, 2009 at 8:48 pm #1505692

David Linn
BPL Member

@davidlinn
Locale: The foot of the Wasatch

Having hiked the Escalante a number of times, this trip was always a much-discussed dream for me and my fellow hikers. Thanks for sharing your experience. It's reawakened my desire to do what we spent late nights along the river planning.

Jun 4, 2009 at 10:35 am #1505824

Ryan Jordan
Admin

@ryan
Locale: Central Rockies

Bill, thanks for the great story.

I think the upper Escalante from town is tough at 1.6 cfs and only mildly irritating down lower, due as much to slow speeds as anything else, especially if you are using it primarily as a means of traveling to explore the side canyons on a long trip, rather than an end unto itself.

At 2.5 cfs, you'd never know it unless you'd done it at low flows, but it's a regular rock concert, and at 5-10, well then you're talking about a more spring runoff like experience where the bigger stuff starts to get submerged.

Jun 4, 2009 at 5:15 pm #1505975

. Callahan
BPL Member

@aeronautical
Locale: London, UK.

Wow! That was fantastic, thanks for sharing! (o:

Jun 5, 2009 at 1:53 am #1506087

Julian Watson
Member

@juleswatson

and after a second read, even better. Makes me want to get on a plane !

Nov 23, 2009 at 6:49 pm #1547564

Sean Shealy
Member

@paleo

"Though exhilarating, the need to make good time in the shallow water prevented us from exploring beyond the main channel."

I call bullsh*t on this comment.

I've done the canyon from Escalante to Fence, and I know EXACTLY why you never left the raft: You're mesmerized. As the canyon walls slip past, you see a crack, an opening, and it towers above you and deep into the rock, and you literally don't breath for several seconds as you glide through, feeling tiny and awed, and by the time you snap the trance and think, "WOW! I WANT TO EXPLORE THAT!," you're on around the bend and entering the next twsit in your adventure …

Been there.

Done that.

Lost most of my T-shirt to the A*shole Trees (as I called 'em. 'Russian Olives,' they say). 8<)

Mar 22, 2010 at 9:14 am #1589381

Thomas Turiano
Member

@tturiano

There seems to be a vast amount of confusion over runnable water levels on the Escalante. I've never run the river, but have been watching it for 10 years, waiting for the coincidence of good flows with time off.

I think many people are confusing cfs and gauge height. There are two graphs on the USGS water data site…one for discharge (cfs) and one for gauge height. The BLM recommends a minimum of 50cfs on the Escalante gauge. This corresponds to a little over 2 feet on the river gauge. I suspect that this posting party and others squeaked through at 1.6 feet, rather than 1.6 cfs. Sheri Tingey ran it at 2 feet, not 2 cfs.

When I someday get to run the Escalante, I will be looking for at least 100 cfs (about 3 feet I would guess) on the Escalante gauge, counting on at least an additional 150 to 200 cfs coming in at Boulder Creek. There used to be a gauge at Boulder Creek, but there is no longer. But Boulder Creek does seem to run with twice as much volume as the upper Escalante during most of the runoff season.

It seems that April and early May are generally not the best times to run the Escalante, unfortunately. The best runoff appears to be during mid May to early June, heavily weighted toward the end of May and early June.

If anyone has anymore first-hand experience on Escalante river levels, I would be interested to hear.

Thanks, Thomas Turiano

Mar 23, 2010 at 3:40 pm #1589996

David Chenault
BPL Member

@davec
Locale: Queen City, MT

Thomas, I've hiked the Esc a good bit. Never boated it, so take this fwiw.

I think you're correct about the confusion over gauge height v. cfs. Looking back at historical data, I can recall one trip years ago where going upriver from Scorpion Gulch to Moody Creek we barely got our knees wet. That was in a late March, with a measured flow of 2.6 cfs at the bridge. Given the levels we saw that low down, I can't believe the upper part would have seen much floating.

On another trip I recall struggling across the river to get into Neon Canyon through a waist deep and fast flow. That was in April, with a gauge reading of about 80 cfs. That seems more likely to be good floating.

My wife and I once ran the Virgin River through the main canyon in Zion (not the narrows) in inflatable kayaks at 300 cfs, and that was about perfect. We butt-checked some gravel bars that we probably would have cleared in a packraft. Much more water and the pushiness would have made some of the rock gardens and sweepers substantially more hazardous.

Packrafting the Esca (and the Narrows) is a dream trip for sure.

Apr 28, 2010 at 12:35 pm #1603222

Jodi Norris
BPL Member

@t_next

The comments about whether it was cfs or gage height had me wondering too, but it was easy enough to check the record for the two months in question (March 2009 for this trip, and May 2008 for Sheri's trip).

The record from both months support that it was CFS being reported – here's an easy link to each months gage data on the USGS website

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/dv?cb_00060=on&cb_00065=on&format=gif_default&begin_date=2008-05-01&end_date=2008-05-31&site_no=09337500&referred_module=sw

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/dv?cb_00060=on&cb_00065=on&format=gif_default&begin_date=2009-03-01&end_date=2009-03-31&site_no=09337500&referred_module=sw
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