Not enough time to blog about last trip. Only home for 24 hours. I’ll catch up soon.

Fall is regarded as the best time to visit the Southwestern desert and we hit it just right. Squeezing in a five day trip to Utah’s Canyons National Park was the perfect way to finish a summer hiking season. Our route was different if you watched out Spot Locator track since we base camped 10 miles into a series of dead-end canyons and tried, unsuccessfully, to connect between them each day.

Fortunately, Will Rietveld did a lot of Google Earth research before the trip and set out a goal of trying to connect up a number of the box canyon fingers to make a loop route for future hikes. Zero for four was our success in the multi-day assault on the various fingered canyons. At the terminus of each valley we bush-whacked our way up to the sandstone and scaled the clean knobs and various cracks, only to find we need contour or traverse a bowl and go further up.

The rewards of discovering windows thru the rock, caves and tunnels, arches and grottos far out weighed the chagrin of not managing a pass between to fingers. Not to mention the colorful sandstone layers contrasted by the clear blue desert skies.

Making tracks in the pristine sandy washes didn’t hurt the feeling of treading on forgotten territory. Forgotten because in several of the canyons there is still panels of artwork from 1000-3,000 years ago, as well as remnants of grouted walls and small watch towers that proved people roamed this region long before us.