Excellent report…especially interesting was the trail conditions etc.
<h4 data-fontsize=”17″ data-lineheight=”25″>Trail Conditions</h4>
Our route was a mix of pavement, dirt roads, jeep tracks, abandoned jeep tracks, established footpaths, and off-trail hiking. 15-20% of the mileage was off-trail and varied in difficulty from class one to class three. The route includes several descents of very steep, high cliffs and wading in flowing water in canyon bottoms. A small amount of scrambling was needed to get over rockfalls and chockstone obstacles in the canyons. Our route across the Henry Mountains included climbing over three chockstones in a narrow canyon with flowing water wall-to-wall, a feat which required Jim’s climbing skills combined with a serendipitous log that we hauled and reused on each obstacle.
Although much of the walking is quite straightforward, this in NOT a route for beginners. If you plan to hike this route, you should have excellent navigational and map reading skills, the ability of read terrain, and previous experience hiking in this type of environment. As Steve Allen, the guru of canyon country hiking says in Canyoneering 2: “If you have any doubts about your qualifications to do any of the routes, they are not for you. Those with enough miles under their feet and days under the rim know who they are.”
There are long stretches without sources of water and you must be able to locate the ones that are there. Many of the water sources are intermittent.
Sections of this walk are remote, have no cell phone coverage and if you become injured or otherwise incapacitated, rescue is uncertain. Even with a gpx track, it requires expertise to read the landscape and pick a useable line. We saw no other hikers on the off-trail portions of this route.
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