Walking through Slots

Little Wild Horse Canyon

Angled morning sunbeams softly bathe the landscape with a rosy warmth, temporarily revealing folded shadows. Later in the day, the steep eroded, ribbed ridges and cliffs will be less distinct, blending into more homogenous heat-baked reds and tans. Bob and I are camped on the southeast side of the San Rafael Swell, 9 miles from Goblin Valley State Park and a mile away from the trailhead of Little Wild Horse Canyon. The dome-shaped anticline uplift creates a sandstone and slate spine that runs a length of 75 miles and reaches a width of 45. Rising daytime temperatures encourage us to get an early 7:45 AM start on an 8-mile loop: 3.6 miles up Wild Horse, 1.6 miles along a connecting dirt road, and 2.8 miles back down Bell Canyon. Time estimates for this hike range from 4 to 6 hours. Posted signs warn hikers to be aware of current weather predictions, since rainstorms from up to 100 miles away will drain down mesas, gathering to create inescapable flash floods that roar down these slot canyon washes. No exit strategies are possible.

From the trailhead, we follow a drainage, a soft depth of sand and gravel, that leads to a ‘Y’, about a half mile distance. The right fork goes into Little Wild Horse. The left fork heads into Bell Canyon. Most accounts recommend starting the loop with Little Wild Horse, maybe because many will turn around at some point, and as we discover, this is the narrower and more spectacular of the 2 slot canyons. Immediately, sculpted sandstone walls rise and narrow to begin a winding journey from one end of the swell to the other. A sliver of blue sky complements the 2-foot-wide passageways. In places, you cannot even stretch your arms out from your sides. Climbing over boulder chockstones, we remove our packs in order to fit through these tight spaces. Dark tones of desert varnish paint the higher reaches, while reddish-brown and tan, ground-level stone is more polished from floodwater or pockmarked with eroded holes. Weaving routes carve upward spiral coves and swirled niches. Striations of angled layers reveal the uplift nature of the swell. Water rarely travels a straight line within these serpentine channels. We bend our bodies around each radical twist and surprising turn, one after another after another, until we laugh out loud at nature’s ridiculous whimsy to express beauty. The fact that a 3-mile-long slot with its 200-foot rise cuts through this pushed-up fold of the earth’s crust confounds the imagination. Such is the grinding persistence of time and elemental erosion. We are walking through a mountain.

The delightfully cool air begins to warm as the canyon wash widens. We see the first signs of vegetation. Vines, grasses, and cottonwoods offer shades of green that brighten the desert rock colors. Apache plume is flowering, joined by the fragrant cliffrose bushes, covered with hundreds of lustrous blooms. In the rock formations above, the ethereal sound of a canyon wren echoes its lilting song in the still air. The canyon intersects a dirt road coming from the direction of Temple Mountain. We hike along the backside of the swell, following the course of the Behind the Reef Road. I don’t know why we thought the road would be flat. It steadily climbs an undulating track of little hills that run through expanses of broken rock. To our left, boulders the size of houses have fallen. We see one that looks as if a sneeze could dislodge it from its 100-foot perch.

While we guess where Bell Canyon will begin, we find ourselves looking forward to a downhill pitch. Finally, the road bends to the left, descending a steeper grade than my tired knees want to navigate. Certainly not an issue for younger folk, but 40 years of skiing and hiking in the mountains have created certain limitations to my comfort zone. A branch off the main 4-wheel drive road enters Upper Bell Canyon.

This canyon is much wider. The footing in this gravel, sand wash adds more challenge to the walk as steps press through its loose surface, sinking and sliding backwards. The steep walls have opened up and decreased in height. Boulders blocking passage in some of the narrower places need to be climbed over, or climbed around, or even scrambled under. At one point, we navigate around a pourover with a 6-foot drop. The sun has climbed higher in the sky and easily penetrates this broader slot canyon, raising temperatures to 80 degrees. It is 10.30 now as we march along.

Having decided to do this 8-mile loop out of curiosity to see how these land formations fit together, we probably would recommend staying in Little Wild Horse Canyon for both the up and the down. It is the most interesting and shade-cooled of the two slots. The round trip would be closer to 6 miles instead of 8.

We return to our van after a respectable pace, taking 4.5 hours, even though we stopped no less than 3 dozen times to take photos and have a bite to eat at the entrance to Upper Bell. The parking lot is full. Vehicles squeeze into other overflow, flat areas. We were lucky to have had the pristine silence of the slots to ourselves almost the entire way.