Arch Tower and Cave Canyon November 14, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Clint and I left Orem early Saturday morning with plans to camp and do a loop hike up Arch Tower Canyon to the top of the San Rafael reef then back down Cave Canyon. The weather had looked iffy all week but we packed up the truck while the snow was still falling and headed out to the swell. We turned off highway 6 just before green river and drove the 4×4 road out to the mouth of Cave Canyon. The temperatures were in the high 30’s as we started out hiking on the east side of the reef towards Tower Arch Canyon.
Tower Arch canyon was nice, and I was glad we did it but not really worth doing a second time. To get through the lower end of the canyon there was a fair amount of scrambling up dry falls, bypassing of more than a few potholes, and a bit of bushwhacking.


Coolest part of Arch Tower canyon was the area full of potholes just above the large dryfall about 1/3 of the way up.


Luckily we were able to bypass this one in the narrowest part of the canyon.

Arch Tower

Looking down canyon at Clint and the Tower.

Just as we made it to the top of the Reef the clouds started to give way to blue skies. We hurried along to the edge of the reef to get some shots of the amazing views. The light on Mexican mountain was pretty incredible with the dark storm in the background.



pretty stoked

That snow started getting awful close…


We only had one hour of good light before we had to make the obvious decision to pack up everything and start hiking down off the reef. As we hiked towards Cave Canyon we soon noticed we were off route, we had cut down the wrong drainage and had passed Ednah Bridge. By the time we notice our error and how to correct it the storm was on top of us so we put our cameras in dry bags and geared up for the snow. Our hike down cave canyon was cold, wet, slippery, and due to the rain/snow I could not take any photos of the little water falls pouring into the canyon. The water flow was really too mild to be considered a flash flood but it’s always amazing to see desert canyons come to life with flowing water. We made it back to the truck at the mouth of Cave Canyon 4.5 hours after we started out, we packed up and got off the rough 4×4 road just before the snow really started to come down hard. We had no desire to get stuck in the desert so we made the decision to bail out on camping and head home after driving the Green River cutoff.

Track Log of our hike.
View Arch Tower – Cave Canyon Loop in a larger map
March 11, 2010 : Rolfs 3.2.2010
March 10, 2010 : Stansbury Island 2.21.2010
February 19, 2010 : Canyonlands and Arches Winter 2010
February 3, 2010 : Winter 2009-2010
December 15, 2009 : Pre-Winter
October 25, 2009 : Squaw Peak 10.25.2009
October 24, 2009 : Onion Creek, Fisher Towers, and Arches
October 14, 2009 : Rusty and Crusty
October 9, 2009 : Escalante – October 2009
September 25, 2009 : Uintas 9.19.2008
September 14, 2009 : Antelope Island and the BST
September 8, 2009 : Cascade Saddle 2009
August 24, 2009 : Uintas 8.22.2009
August 21, 2009 : Stars over Sundance
July 31, 2009 : Timp Day Hike
July 15, 2009 : Uintas July-2009
July 4, 2009 : Painting Sundance
June 30, 2009 : Uintas – June 2009
June 23, 2009 : Provo Peak
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