Grand Staircase - Escalante Loop (aka The Loop of Doom) Day 3
We woke up good and rested in our Escalante Hotel, ready to tackle another day. Again, the goal was to get as far as we could before the heat of the sun, preferably ending by about 2:00 or so and setting up camp for the day. Our goal was to get as far as we could, hopefully making it to Last Chance Creek via Left Hand Collette Canyon. We got started as the sun was rising and were pleased to be greeted by five miles of paved road, followed by another five miles of generally downhill gravel/dirt (Hole in the Rock Road), which was in excellent condition.
Our speedy process halted when our Garmin told us to veer right onto an old decommissioned BLM road that looked more like a sand pit than a road. We ventured off, getting stuck in the deep silt, not able to ride to the side because of all the goat heads that surrounded the trail on either side. Eventually the “road” tapered off into some bushes and we hacked our way through, following our Garmin’s to the general direction of Left Collette road, which is where we were meant to end up. I haven’t looked back at the route map, but my guess is that in the process of routing, we managed to route the shortest way to Collette Canyon road, but definitely not the easiest. I would highly suggest taking the Hole in the Rock rd. all the way down to where it meets with Collette. The sand pit was a bust.
The trek through Left Hand Collette Canyon was a little rough going, but worth the ride. It was beautiful and cool down there and we even ran into some trickling water, which Ryan and Patty filtered. Not long after we filtered, as we started climbing out of the canyon, a Razr OHV came by and let me know that Patty was behind with a flat tire. This would be Patty’s second flat of the trip, this time in his front tire. We couldn’t tell where the flat was, or why it went flat, so we just put more sealant in it and pumped it up with our last CO2. Ryan was up ahead and had another, so we hoped nothing else happened along the way.
We stopped briefly for lunch at the top of the climb, once we found some shade. We tried to keep moving as much as possible because the day was getting hot and we wanted to get to Last Chance Creek. At the top of the summit before last chance, we ran into two adventure moto guys who looked like two tanned pieces of leather. They were making their way back to Yuma, AZ after an adventure ride up to Montana and then back down. Epic! They generously shared one of their water bottles with us, which we promptly guzzled. It wasn’t cold, but it was cooler than what we each had. Shortly thereafter, we found where we thought last chance creek would be. It was dry. Our moods deflated a bit and we decided to plop ourselves right there and then. We found a flat spot in a wash (there was no chance of rain), and laid there for a while, trying to recover a bit in the shade.
As we lounged in the covered wash area, I glanced down the hill and noticed there were some green Aspens. Knowing that aspens usually grow around water, I suspected that we may have plopped down just a bit early. Patty went on a scouting hike and sure enough, just down the road next to the aspens, was a small trickling stream, that even pooled enough at points to easily filter water and rinse ourselves off. Our little oasis was a god-send and our moods instantly lifted! We wouldn’t have to worry about conserving water for our final day of riding and we had all the water we needed to cool off and re-hydrate.
The rest of the afternoon consisted of water time and waiting for the sun to go down. We ate dinner at sunset and went to bed early so that we could make our 3:30am wake up call to try to get done by noon the following day.
