Part 3 - The Start
So on Thursday the 5th of May, ready or not, my adventure began.
The first night I spent at a rest stop near La Grand Oregon, and the second night on the road, was spent at Pine Lake Campground, near Powell Point. I was staged for an early start. I drove out of the campground just after first light, I had decided to take Cottonwood Canyon road to cut off the corner on my way to Big Water. It was a beautiful diversion. With a planned stop at the Ranger Station in Big Water to check on road conditions and fill up before I hit the dirt for a few days. Left Hand Collet Canyon had been closed and I wanted to see if I was going to have to take the long way around.
I should have learned my lesson not to ask questions you don't want a “NO” answer to, from the year before; these rangers are paid to try to discourage people from going into the backcountry and getting themselves, or their loved one's, stuck and/or hurt. So they're pretty much always going to say that anything ‘might' be impassable. The condition of the road to the Grand Bench was as follows: “Oh I don't know if that road is even open, the last time I heard about people going in there, the Jeeps got stuck and had to rope together like mountain climbers and pull each other out.” I did find out that they expected to open Left Hand Collet Canyon road on Saturday - how convenient!
It felt strange that a year after my first visit, I still had a picture in my mind of what the trail beyond the gate of the Mary Bullock Ranch looked like. It still gave me the butterflies. All my research had only increased my anxiety, I wasn't very comfortable thinking about getting stuck on, or on the way to the Grand Bench. Or how expensive it might be. As I approached from the west, I passed Croton Road on the left, climbing up Surprise Valley to the Kaiparowits Plateau, to the northeast. The way I was expecting to be traveling the next day. I crossed the creek in the bottom of the wash and followed Little Valley Road as it circled towards the ranch, which is perched on the western rim of Little Valley Canyon. I decided to stop at the turnout above the ranch and walk to the edge above Mary Bullock's old place to see what it looked like from above. I wanted to see what I could learn about the road past the gate and over the edge and to see if I cold spot where the road went through the opposite side of the canyon rim, as it crested the plateau of the Grand Bench.
I parked and got out. The first thing that I noticed when I closed the truck door was that it was noisy out, I had expected it to be quiet. The noise I discovered, once I peered over the edge, was coming from a motorcycle, down in the canyon below me. It's rider was having a difficult time getting up the road out of the canyon and back up to the ranch. He was having such a difficult time that he had dismounted and was trying to coax his riderless bike up through the obstacles. After he dropped it twice, he finally made it up through the gate, parked his bike and killed the engine. Suddenly I was hit with the silence I had been expecting. I could see that the rider had found some shade next to a ranch ‘building' and was sitting on the ground having a snack. About two or three hundred yards away, I could see the jagged wall, that was the far rim of the canyon. I could make out some of the trail that led through the notch in the top as it scrambled its way up to the Bench.
You can see some of the road on both sides of the canyon.
The trail directly below me dropped steeply over a couple of small benches and then hit a wide spot in the canyon wall and nearly leveled out. From there, it dropped through another gate and disappeared towards the south, down the canyon and along the creek below. I walked back to my truck and drove the rest of the way to the Ranch. Once I parked in the now familiar compound of the MBR, I struck up a conversation with the motorcycle rider to find out where he had been and what he knew about the trail.
He was riding out of Escalante with three other riders who had made it up onto the GB. They had all helped each other up the “rock slide” on the trail up the other side the canyon, until he was the last one, and there was no one left to help him - so he elected to be left behind. I asked him if he had seen any vehicles and what he knew about the trail once you hit the rim. They had “passed no one since they left Escalante” early that morning and he didn't know anything about the trail; they were “just following the road” on the BLM map. He told me that he had seen no other vehicles.
I unlatched the gate and went through and began to walk down the trail before I drove it, as I had promised myself I would. Each time, before I would drive a technical or hazardous section, I would walk the trail until the next turnaround, then make sure that could drive it in reverse, as I waked back to the truck. The trail was steep, and rocky, and carved into a rock wall. With a particularly nasty three-foot-deep trench cutting across the first turn - diagonally. Each of my tires would have to cross the trench, but about seventy feet apart because of the way the ditch cut across the trail. I was pumped to finally be at my first major objective and I thought that I could make it.
I aired down to 18 lbs, said goodbye to my friend with the KTM, who asked me to let his friends know where he was, so that he wouldn't get left behind. I was anxious to drive something with some challenge, so I headed through the gate and down the trail, crawling apprehensively down the slope trying to stay away from its off-camber edge leaning down towards Mud Hole Creek. (10/26)The going was slow, but I made it through and got out to walk ahead and survey the next section. It was obvious that this canyon had been used for cattle ranching for a while. There were ranching artifacts everywhere: wire, gates, troughs, planks, pipes, all the right stuff for a remote and primitive cattle operation. The canyon is perfect for keeping cattle, access is extremely limited with sheer walls to the east and west, Lake Powell, down the canyon, to the south and the face of FiftyMile Mountain to the north. There probably weren't too many holes that had to be plugged in order to keep the cows in. No need to build much fence.
A short video showing the return trip through the notch on the Grand Bench side. Sorry for the background noise
After the next section, I reached the creek and could keep driving without having to scout ahead. The width of the canyon bottom varied between 50 feet to about 100 yards; I would NOT want to be down here during a flash flood - you'd end up in Lake Powell. If you were lucky. As I was driving under an overhang in the creek bank, the returning motorcyclists suddenly appeared and passed me on the right. I had no chance to tell them about their friend. Hopefully he hadn't bedded down in one of the trailers and would be able to hear them coming up the hill out of the canyon towards the ranch. The road ran south down the canyon towards the lake, until it makes a u-turn and heads up the rock shelf that eventually leads to the rim of the Grand Bench. The road gets a bit tricky, you have to negotiate several ditches that wind randomly along and cross the trail where ever they please; a testament to the volume of water that flows through here on occasion. I stacked some rocks in a few places on the way up, and walked the trail to find the best approach and the best line, but after a while I found my self working out the way through the dugway, to the gain the plateau that is the Grand Bench.
Coming back down the next day thru the dugway.
Suddenly I found my self at the top, the trail was just a trail, and not an uncertain thing. It was quite a thrill, I had finally, successfully, made it. Something that I had worried about for nearly a year. It wasn't too bad, a little sketchy in a few stretches, especially without a spotter in a few places. There were some sections that I was already becoming nervous about having to driving back through, although “going downhill is much easier” I told myself.
From there, I didn't know what to expect. The Expedition Utah guys in their LC '80's mentioned that they had some route finding challenges between here and the point. From Google Maps, the bench looks mostly flat, you can see that it gains altitude as it nears Fifty Mile mountain, but all in all, it looks pretty flat from space. Well it isn't, it's actually quite rugged. The road travels from left to right on the map, across the bench and was in pretty decent shape, slow going, but nothing impassable. It wound it's way up the side of a smallish canyon for about forty minutes, traveling east. At that point, I thought that I might be alone on this vast island in the sky with it's own miniature mountain range with dry streams and dry waterfalls and small mesas and hoodoos. It was huge. Far bigger that I had imagined. It was then that I came around a corner and met Mike (AZHeat) traveling in his FJ along with a couple of his friends in nice Rubicon's. We stopped and chatted and I asked about exploring the neck. They had done a side-trip up onto the neck, but the trails quickly got worse and quite narrow; better suited to an ATV. They left the FJ behind, to go on further in the Jeeps, but made little progress because of unstable washouts. At that point they decided to pack it in and move on. He was a bit surprised to see me, saying that he didn't think that he would have done it alone. That made me happy and fearful at the same time. “Maybe really I shouldn't be out here by myself” I repeated in my mind. He told me that once they left the Bench, I would have it all to myself, at least as far as he knew. After the motorcyclists left, they had seen no one.
I let them pass and drove on. After a while longer, I came to an intersection. I knew that to the left was the road that headed up onto the neck. I went right and headed over the “pass” and began to descend the small mountain-range-on-a-bench I had been following for over an hour. The road had turned and I was heading south. After a while the rough going played out and mountains became savannah. As far as you could see it was mostly grass, yucca, bushes and some small trees. The road had gone from rock to hard-packed sand and was a to drive at near-desert speeds. It wound for twelve miles towards no point in particular just generally towards Lake Powell. When you're driving down in the tall grass, it's all horizon. It was a very fun drive. When I reached the end, I could have gone a bit further, there a was a beautiful camp on a bit of a point 50 feet below but I chose the campspot on the high ground with a 360deg view. It was a wonderful view - well worth the trouble.
End of Part 3
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