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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

The weather report did not look very promising for the weekend but we packed up the kids and headed down to the San Rafael Swell anyways.   We arrived mid afternoon to North Temple wash and had to settle for a second rate campsite. We set up camp then drove north to hike the lower end for Fransworth Canyon. We hiked up the slot to the point where we hit water where the boys threw rocks while the dog swam. We took photos and leisurely walked back to the cars and made it back about 90 minutes after we started.

We left the Farnsworth Canyon trail head and drove up North Temple wash to the west side of Temple mountain. We took a few photos of the old car and the cabin at the Vanaduim king mine.

Lanik and I

We ate dinner sat around the camp fire then tried to do a bit a light painting. The clouds were to thick to get start trails so we spent our time making orbs and getting eaten by bugs.

The rain started around 2 or 3am and went all night long we woke up around 8 and packed up camp.  After we drove to the Goblin Valley VC to check the weather reports we decided to drive back to Green river to top of the tanks and try to drive up to the north end of the swell.

We arrived in Black Dragon Canyon under threatening skies but the rain had stopped and the roads were dry. We parked at the main art panel and hiked up to show the kids the cave, On our way down to form the cave the rain slowly then turned into a down pour. Within 5 minutes we rushed down to the car and started driving the rough road down canyon. Water falls poured into the canyons from all sides, this was my first flash flood.

The rain stopped and the wash not running very high to so we took some photos and made the four wash crossings to get out of the canyon. We got on I-70 and drove east towards Buckhorn Wash.  We stopped ad the San Rafael River bridge to eat lunch and let the kids play in the water.  As we drove up Buckhorn wash we made a quick stop to show the kids the Dinosaur footprints in the sandstone but they had more fun playing in the puddle next to it.

Next stop was the Wedge Overlook – perfect clouds and light this time. Bowen was far too busy to join us for a family photo.

While we enjoyed the Wedge we decided to stay one more night, we drove back down Buckhorn and found a great campsite not far off the road. We had never camped in Buckhorn but have drivien through it many times and were pretty shocked to see how little traffic actually passed by.

Camp

The clouds parted after sunset and we were able to take some photos of startrails.

Good times.