Crack Canyon
A unique minimart at a gas station in Hanksville
I spent a weekend at Homestead Crater, near Park City, doing open water dives for my PADI scuba certification. When I finished, instead of going home, I headed south. The weather forecast was good and I was already in Utah, so I figured I would spend some time hiking in canyon country.
Since Sandy wasn't along I decided to go to Hanksville Utah. We stayed there overnight once before on a previous hiking trip. It's a desolate and remote place. In fact it's so desolate and remote that the Mars Society chose it as the location for its simulated martian habitat. The Mars Desert Research Station is only seven miles outside of Hanksville. There isn't much to the town either. There are three gas stations, three restaurants, a general store and two motels. One of the motels isn't an option since it has some of the worst reviews I have ever seen on trip advisor. A third of the ratings were "Terrible" which is quite impressive. I figured that if I was ever going to stay in Hanksville again, it would be better to do it when I was traveling on my own. At least it had the advantage that it was a lot cheaper than alternative places like Springdale or Moab. I would save those destinations for trips when Sandy came along.
Cliffs along the Behind the Reef Road
Although there isn't much to the town there is a lot of good hiking near Hanksville. It's the closest base for accessing Horseshoe Canyon in the far western portion of Canyonlands National Park, Goblin Valley State Park and several interesting canyons in the San Rafael Swell. I had done some great hikes there but still had several more on my To Do list.
We had a 6 am time slot at the Homestead Crater for my final certification dives so I was done early. By ten I was cleaned up, packed up, checked out and ready to hit the road. Rather than going back to I15 (which is what Google recommended) I decided to take a more roundabout route through Duchesne. It was slightly longer but I had never been through that way so was curious what was there. Not much, it turned out. I did get one unpleasant surprise though. There were two mountain passes on the route, including one that went to eight thousand feet. That's not good so soon after diving. Fortunately all our dives were short and quite shallow so I didn't suffer any ill effects. I just got caught by surprise because I'm not used to diving anyplace but at the ocean.
Approaching the entrance to Crack Canyon
After the drive to Hanksville I spent the night at the Whispering Sands Motel, the much better of the two motels in Hanksville. It was actually quite nice. The room looked like it had recently been redone and it had a fridge, microwave, flat screen tv and coffee maker. It was quite inexpensive too. Most importantly, the bed was comfortable. Having woken up at 4 am for my dives, I was in bed and asleep early.
The next morning was cold, about forty degrees, but with a clear blue sky. I had slept in. There was no point in getting up earlier because it just would have been colder. It was supposed to warm up through the day so it would be good hiking weather. Since I was going to be driving a dirt road and didn't know how rough it was going to be, I completely unpacked my car and left everything but my daypack in the room. I didn't need everything being tossed around inside my car. It must have looked strange to the person that cleaned my room though, seeing two scuba tanks and a pile of dive gear in a motel room in the middle of the desert. I wonder what they thought.
Hiking through an open section of the canyon
Even though Hanksville is the closest town to the southern San Rafael Swell I still had a bit of a drive. It was twenty miles on the highway, then seven miles on a paved road and then another six on a dirt road known as the Behind the Reef Road. It was a good dirt road although it was very rough in places where it actually crossed slick rock. In places the rock broke off in slabs so you could have a sharp edge in the road surface that was one to three inches high. I took my time, made it to the trailhead and was ready to start hiking before 9 am. I was the only car at the trailhead so I had the place all to myself.
The hike that I was planning to do was through Crack Canyon. According to the guidebook there was some easy scrambling required to get past a few obstacles but nothing technical. For me that's part of the fun of doing a canyon hike. Just in case I couldn't get through I did have an alternate plan. Just a few miles further down the road was the trailhead for Chute Canyon, another hike that was supposed to be very easy. If I was really ambitious I might even be able to do both canyons the same day.
In the overhanging, cave-like narrows
When I left my car the thermometer said that it was forty degrees. It didn't feel that cold though and I was comfortable wearing just a light jacket and a baseball cap for warmth. To be safe I did take some extra clothes in my daypack which turned out to be a good idea. As I walked, instead of warming up I gradually felt colder. I ended up putting on a warm hat and a pile vest under my jacket. I guess I must be getting old.
There aren't really any trails in the San Rafael Swell. The hikes are all through a canyons and there usually isn't much choice about where to go. The Crack Canyon route started out on a 4WD track and then later followed the bottom of a dry wash to the start of the canyon. Cliffs rose on both sides and after walking a little over a mile I was inside the canyon and reached the first obstacle. It was a series of three pouroffs that were each about six to eight feet high. It was easy to scramble down them although on the way back I found out that it was possible to bypass them. That wouldn't have been as much fun though.
An easy downclimb in the second narrows
Now I was in the canyon proper. It was quite wide with a gravel bottom and cliffs towering several hundred feet above me on both sides. The sides kept closing in and I reached the first narrows section, where sometimes the canyon was only six to ten feet wide at the bottom. For one short stretch the walls overhung so much that it was more like walking through a cave then a canyon.
After the overhangs the canyon opened up for a while again before entering a second section of narrows. This one was quite long and had several obstacles. All of them were easy to scramble around or down. Except one. A large boulder was blocking the bottom of the canyon. There was a drop of about eight feet to the ground on the other side. The canyon walls were smooth and rounded and overhanging so it didn't look easy to climb down. They extended straight up at least thirty feet so I couldn't see any way to bypass the boulder either. This was obviously the way as there was a climbing sling looped around a rock at the top of the dropoff.
I didn't think for too long. I hadn't seen anyone else all morning and was hiking by myself. I didn't really feel like trying a difficult downclimb. Plus I remembered the first rule of canyoneering - always be sure that you can climb back up anything that you climb down. Even if I managed to climb/slide/jump down the overhanging rock I had to get back up again to get back to my car. After a minute or two of deliberation I decided I was content with the progress that I had made so far and turned around and started to head back.
Beautiful views hiking back out of Crack Canyon
Not long after starting back I saw my first other party, a man and woman. They were about the same age as me (in other words, really old). We chatted for a bit. I mentioned that I had turned back at an obstacle a short way ahead. They said that they had hiked the canyon before and had been stopped at the same place. After that I didn't feel so badly. Later I passed a couple with a young boy and three dogs. I suspect they weren't going to make it all the way through either. Those were the only people I saw. For such a spectacular place I had it to myself most of the time.
When I got back to my car the GPS app on my phone showed that I had hiked a little under five miles. I wasn't tired. It was a little before noon so I still had the whole afternoon. The weather had warmed up and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. It was perfect hiking weather. I decided that I would drive down the road to the next trailhead and try hiking through Chute Canyon. One of my engineering professors always used to say, if one is good two are better. I'm not sure it's what he had in mind but I figured if hiking through one canyon was good, then hiking through two canyons would be better.
