Buckskin Gulch

The hail you say! We originally planned on being in Kanab six days, we stayed nine. Our plans were blown up by the tail end of the monsoon season.  We had some rain five days in a row. The last place you want to be is in a slot canyon during a downpour or stuck boondocking in the middle of nowhere waiting for the dirt roads to dry. I’ve got a couple of videos from the biggest deluge, including hail, but they are so laced with profanities that the editor has advised not including them in the post. I really had no choice but to agree with her, but if you’re dying to see it contact me. 😉

I swear 😂 every time we turned our heads we saw a new RV park or one under construction.  I’m not one to make predictions, but my sense is the demand will be over met and hopefully competition will drive down the nightly rate.

Two weeks into our trip, the hot water heater crapped out on us. We called a mobile RV mechanic. He was a 17-year-old kid that came out once his classes were over at Kanab High School and fixed it. All it needed was a $10 part.

File this under it’s a small world: I visited a chiropractor in town, Dr. Marc Grow, the guy was Class of 2002 from Poway High.

This isn’t a mountain biking town, but if you’re here with your bike go ride Tilted Mesa. It’s a great little trail system and it was never crowded. All the crowds were at the popular hiking trailheads. Still hard to believe it’s mid September and this many folks are out and about. Apparently the cat is out of the bag, but the early bird still gets the worm.

Now without further ado, here are the pictures.

Here’s the top secret spot we stayed at for 6 days. Prior to this we fell for the hype and stayed at an expensive “boutique” RV park called Dark Sky.

Peekaboo Slot Canyon: to get there it’s a deep sandy road that I wouldn’t even attempt in our old 4×4 Tundra, so we hired a guide through Dreamland Safari Tours, the same outfit that took us to The Wave.

Another glowing shot

The tour also took us to the White Wave. It was cool, but nowhere near the other worldliness of The Wave.

Here’s a perspective shot of a rock monolith with people in it. 

On the other side of the rock monolith was this alcove with petroglyphs.

Cool petroglyphs

Prairie Spiderwort, funny name for a beautiful flower

Tilted Mesa, developed by the Bureau of Land Management. Kudos to them! They did a terrific job.

63 year old singlespeeder!

We saw a lot of galls on the oak trees. They are smaller than the ones we see in San Diego. The internets explains it as: “leaves that have developed into a thin sphere because wasps have laid eggs inside of the leaf. Inside the gall is a tiny wasp larva.”

Lucky ducks!

The day after The Wave we did Wire Pass slot to some of Buckskin Gulch. It’s our second time in Buckskin. If you are ever out here I would suggest starting from the Buckskin Gulch Trailhead instead of Wire Pass.

The narrow Wire Pass slot

All the rain made Buckskin Gulch a slippery muddy mess, so we ended up focusing on our foot steps a lot!

Close to our turnaround point, further down required wading.

There’s no denying it, the glow in a slot canyon is pretty cool.

Apache Plume

Before leaving Kanab we dipped in to Arizona to get beer since Utah is Utah.