5 October 2023
Cathedral Butte to Kirk’s Cabin
(12 miles).

I was supposed to do a hike on the Colorado Trail this summer with my friend ChiaGlyph, but it got cancelled due to rain. So we immediately started talking about an alternate.

He suggested a trip to Canyonlands National Park, which I’ve never visited, so I was immediately intrigued.

We were originally going to drive there separately and shuttle cars to do a thru-hike across the park, but ChiaGlyph really loves exploring ruins and I didn’t want to rush him past them to make miles, so we decided to do a there-and-back trip instead.

I flew to Denver and stayed the night with him and the next day we drove out to Moab to get our permit. Then on to Cathedral Butte where we found a nice dispersed campsite to sleep the night before our trip.

The next morning we woke with the sun, packed our stuff, and started a thousand foot descent into Upper Salt Creek Canyon.

I was not expecting so much plant life. It’s a desert, right? But the trail was quite overgrown with Russian thistle and other prickly plants. Soon my legs were a scratchy bloody mess.

ChiaGlyph has a great book about Canyonlands by Michael Kelsey that shows where to look for ruins, and we spent quite a bit of time at the first point on the map marked “granary.” We had to cross the wash and bushwhack into a pocket to look for it.

We gave up, but we eventually saw it much higher than we were expecting as we walked a few hundred meters away from the place where we were searching.

There were supposed to be ruins in the next pocket up, so we bushwhacked in there, too. No luck, but it was really pretty.

When we got back on trail it descended into a swamp that was thick with ten-foot high grasses. We had to wade our way through, following occasional blue ribbons tied to the vegetation by Park Service Rangers.

About three miles from the trailhead we finally got a close-up look at some pictographs right by the trail.

Then at the four mile mark we found a lovely water source, just a short ways from an old structure called Kirk’s Cabin.

Our designated campsite for the first night was just a little ways north of Kirk’s Cabin. We went there to set up camp, then organized day packs for a trip up to Big Pocket. On the way we saw our first ruins up close.

Near Big Pocket we looked for a ruin but couldn’t find it.

Then we entered Big Pocket and checked out a route to Lavender Canyon that we were thinking of doing later in the trip

We crossed the very-scratchy flats of Big Pocket to get a closer look at the route, and when we turned around we realized that we had walked right past a very cool ruin. D’oh! We scratched our way back.

There were actually several structures at the same level, all around the small butte at the entry to Big Pocket. We explored them until it was time to head back to camp.

My legs are beat! I should probably wear my wind pants tomorrow. We’ll see….

In the meantime, I am not looking forward to our water carry tomorrow. Other hikers have said that the water ahead is difficult to access and sketchy. So we will both be carrying almost two gallons (16 pounds!) of water to cover our needs for the next two days.

Fortunately, it is only five trail miles to our next campsite. But the miles out here are really slow, almost like pure off-trail travel.