A little more thought on a Needles trip

Let's see more specifically how I could pull this off, and specifically how to pull it off in a week, since I don't want to take more than 5 days of vacation.  Most likely, I'd try to take this trip in March, in which I can't tack on any holiday days, but if I somehow decided that going in later April and adding the Easter holiday to the routine, I could make it easier, including keeping the trip down to four days of vacation time and having more cushion to do it in as well.  But let's go for the harder itinerary first.

Day 1 (Saturday): Drive from home to my normal mid-Nebraska midpoint.
Day 2 (Sunday): Drive from mid-Nebraska to Moab.
Day 3 (Monday): First day of Chesler Park hike
Day 4 (Tuesday): Second day; stay back at Squaw Canyon campground
Day 5 (Wednesday): First day of Salt Canyon exploration
Day 6 (Thursday): Second day of Salt Canyon and Horse Canyon exploration; back at Sqauw Canyon
Day 7 (Friday): Explore some other Moab sites reachable by car, particularly Fisher Towers.
Day 8 (Saturday): Drive back to Omaha
Day 9 (Sunday): Drive the rest of the way home.

If I do it in April, I can leave on Friday, take fewer vacation days, and get an extra day of hiking, which means I can actually do Horse Canyon and Salt Creek canyon as to discrete trips with a stop back at the water and established campground at Squaw Canyon.  I have to come almost all the way back to Squaw Canyon campground from exploring one to take the other fork to the other anyway, and that keeps me from needing to carry more than two days worth of water.

Of course, I may decide that I don't even want that much backcountry time anyway, and that I've already bit off as much as I want to chew.

I also don't really like using Sundays as driving days, but realistically, with a normal work schedule and a 2-day drive on either end of the trip, I don't have a lot of choices that don't make significant sacrifices to my ability to actually do the purpose of the trip.  I suppose if it's really that bad, I could stop for Church somewhere in whatever town I'm passing through at 9 AM and get at least sacrament meeting, but most likely I'll consider that and not do it, which is what normally happens.  It's just too difficult to pull off, and makes my arrival schedule too late that day too.

I may be overthinking the water management problem, though.  From what I've seen of trip reports in the area, it's not necessarily that dry during the spring.  And this was actually quite a bit later in the spring than I was talking about.  In fact, it's late enough that if this worked out, it does kind of make me think that maybe April or even early May might not be a bad time to go.

https://backcountrypost.com/threads/salt-creek-canyonlands.3945/

https://www.visitutah.com/things-to-do/backpacking/canyon-country-southern-utah/big-needles-loop-canyonlands/

https://www.backpacker.com/trips/canyonlands-national-park-salt-creek-lavender-canyon-loop

UPDATE: I suspect that, as normal, I'm being too ambitious.  I see from various online trip reports that people do the Salt Creek as a point to point and still take 4-5 days to do it.  Here, I'm thinking that I'd jaunt most of the way down it and turn around all in two days!  Granted, some of those people had rather leisurely approaches, but then again; wouldn't I rather do that myself?  One group got caught in a pretty serious storm that lasted most of an afternoon, and then had to contend with flooded, swampy conditions the next day, both of which slowed them up considerably too.  But, it looks like unless you're doing a late season approach, there should be plenty of water in the Salt Creek canyon to make carrying gallons and gallons unnecessary.  In any case, I've seen other trip reports that call it a day hike, albeit a long one.  I'm unsure on how to proceed.

Although it's not cheap, I like the idea of having a shuttle. (It gets cheaper (per person, anyway) the more you have in your party.)  Hiking from Cathedral Butte to Chesler Park sounds doable and great, before finishing the Chesler Park loop and returning to Squaw Canyon campground and the car.

Needles district potential itinerary?

I'll add a Caltopo of this later.  How about starting at Elephant Hill (or Squaw Flat if the road to Elephant Hill looks bad) and doing two separate jaunts.  One of them does a loop into Chesler Park, spends the night there, sees Druid Arch, comes back around through Joint Trail, and gets back after less than 48 hours.  There are five campsites in Chesler, and any of them will do, although CP1 is further away from the other four, which are relatively close.  The two EC campsites are another nearby option.

At Squaw Flat, by the way, there's drinking water and a campground, so after doing this, we just dump out there and spend the night.  Early the next morning, we tank up our water containers (including our stomachs!) and hit the trail again, this time heading more directly south and exploring the Big Spring and Squaw Canyon areas before taking the Salt Creek Canyon and spending another night at SC4.  This is a relatively long day of hiking (about 15 miles or so) but you could cut it back to nearly 10 by just heading more directly to Salt Creek Canyon.  You'll probably want to come back that way anyway.  Get SC4 for two nights and explore the Salt Creek Canyon area the second day without your packs, specifically seeing Angel Arch.  If going all the way to Kirk's Cabin isn't your thing, you can instead take the unimproved road to Paul Bunyan's Potty, Tower Ruin, Fortress Arch and Castle Arch, and get back to SC4.  After spending two nights at SC4, head back to your car and into Moab for a shower, a restaurant and recuperation before driving back home.


Fairly quick and easy, without over-extending too much (although if I really hiked all the way to Cathedral Butte and back, that second leg would be more than 50 miles, without even talking about the side exploration, so that's probably not happening.

It would be easier if I had a good 4-wheel drive, of course, because I'm walking on some umimproved jeep trails for part of the way that I could drive on with the right vehicle.  But still; I prefer my feet anyway. I just won't be able to do all of this, because the second loop is potentially too ambitious.  I marked more than I'd ever be willing to do.  Plus, with water being an issue, even in March or early April, I don't want want to spend more than two nights and three days out.  Maybe not even that long if it's really dry and relatively hot.

Triple Tiara?

Although I romanticize the idea of hiking the really big long trails, I know that realistically I won't ever do it, nor do I really want to.  For multiple reasons, including, although not necessarily limited to:

• How in the world do people get 5-6 months off, anyway?  I suspect that most hikers have managed to retire early, or more likely, they're younger people who have put off becoming real adults, in many respects.  (As an aside, this doesn't make "the social trails" like the AT and the way the PCT is starting to become in many respects, more attractive, does it?)  I have, in addition to paid holiday, which only adds a day or two in the window that I'd be able to hike (the Easter holiday... maybe.  Memorial Day.  Independence Day.  Labor Day.) four weeks of paid vacation.  In the next year or two that will bump up to five.  I can also "buy" up to two additional weeks, although then that becomes essentially unpaid vacation, because I don't get paid for it anymore.  That's nowhere near enough to hike one of these long trails.  And I'm not likely to be able to afford taking an unpaid sabbatical anytime soon; I still have two teenagers at home, a college student-aged kid who's temporarily back at home while she figures out what she actually wants to do, and a married son who'll probably start providing grandkids sometime in the next few years that I'll need to visit.  Plus, my wife won't be really thrilled with me deciding that I'm not going to dedicate any of my time off to actual family vacations, I don't think.  While that doesn't have to be a complete show-stopper, it's usually not wise to tell your wife that you don't care about any of her concerns and you're going to do what you want to do anyway.  Realistically, even in the next few years when my vacation bumps up, the idea of taking more than three weeks or so isn't very realistic.  
• Of course, I could wait until I retire.  But quite honestly, I'm already getting old enough, stiff enough, tired enough, overweight enough, etc. that even the small hikes that I do do are physically challenging.  Not over-challenging, but challenging.Given that I'm unlikely to retire for at least another 12-13 years, and even then, I'll probably go get another job when I do, that's only going to get worse, of course.
• To be perfectly fair, I don't know that I even want to do it as much as I think sometimes that I do.  I tend to get tired of camping after a while, and being dirty, and eating crappy camp food, and sleeping on the ground.  5-6 months of that is 4-5 months more than I want, at least all stuck together like it is.  Now; let's imagine for the sake of argument that somebody with a bunch of money came to me and told me that they'd created a trust fund to pay for me to go hiking as my job.  Realistically, what I'd probably prefer to do is take 4-5 smaller week-long trips spread throughout the year, plus maybe a bigger epic trip of, oh, three weeks or so.  And probably 1-2 of those 4-5 trips might be ones where I spend as much time in a lodge or hotel as I do in a tent, but I'm hiking and sightseeing the great outdoors of America during the day.  (Plus, that way I'm much more likely to talk my wife into coming along.)  That would probably really be my ideal wishful thinking way of doing this hobby.

So, that said, are there smaller chunks of trail that can offer the Triple Crown experience, but in a more manageable format that's smaller?  Other than section hiking the trails over the course of many years, of course (which is another viable way to do it.)?

I think so.  Here's a link to the "junior" Triple Crown, sometimes called tongue-in-cheek, the Triple Tiara.  From that link: "My name is Jim, though on the trail I'm occasionally known as Simba. When I retired a few years ago I returned to backpacking and found, for me, the sweet spot is long trails, but not that long. In the past few years I've thru-hiked the Colorado Trail, Long Trail, JMT, Tahoe Rim Trail and Sheltowee Trace. To me, these 200-500 mile trails can be life changing, without taking so long that I have to change my life to accomplish them. I think they're a great alternative for those that don't have the time, ability, circumstances, or need to hike one of the Triple Crown. I hope to share that point of view on these pages."

He offers as smaller alternatives to the big three, Vermont's The Long Trail to replace the Appalachian Trail, Colorado's Colorado Trail to replace the Continental Divide Trail and California's The John Muir Trail to replace the Pacific Crest Trail.  All three of these actually share right of way at least for some of their length with the trails that they're replacing.

Of course, they also miss one of the most important aspects of the CDT and the PCT in particular, namely that there's no "desert" section, when the near desert of southern California, most of New Mexico and a good half of Wyoming make up at least a third of the lengths of those two trails.  So, if I were doing one of these every year for the next, oh, I dunno—half a dozen or so years or so—I wouldn't worry about it being "triple" anything, I'd just do something that I'd really like to go see.  My choices would be to put off the Long Trail until probably near the end, where I'd (admittedly, somewhat grudgingly) do it and the Presidential Traverse after I'd already done the other parts.

I actually am not sure that the Colorado Trail is within scope.  At nearly twice the length of the other longer trails, it's really probably a 5-6 week affair, even if I were in better shape than I am now.  The Arizona Trail would be a great substitute for the desert sections of the CDT and PCT, plus a great trail in its own right, but it's over half again as long as the Colorado Trail.  Most likely, those would have to be broken up into two and three or even four respectively sections and hiked separately.  

But if I had that wishful thinking job and had to come up with half a dozen significant hikes every year, one of which was multi-week and required resupplies, I think I'd target the following trails. 

• John Muir Trail
• Colorado Trail, parts 1 and 2
• Arizona Trail in three parts (maybe four?)
• Wonderland Trail
• Tahoe Rim Trail
• Wyoming Wind Rivers Traverse (probably using the CDT Knapsack Col alternate), connected to the Gros Ventre Wilderness, connected to a full Teton Crest Trail.
• The Grand Enchantment Trail, or at least the part that isn't already on the Arizona Trail which is already covered above.
• The Presidential Traverse
• The Long Trail

That's not half a dozen.  That's over a dozen.  Oh, well.

Options for 2019

I've got a few trips already scheduled around which I need to plan my hiking.  But, one (maybe two) of those other trips are actually hiking trips!

Let's have a look, shall we?  I get about four weeks of vacation annually (plus a good two to three weeks of paid holiday; I do fairly well, although I'm excited for about two more years when I get bumped up another week of paid vacation) and I tend to try and chunk my stuff into weeks, as much as possible.

Already planned

1. Week for Caribbean cruise in late August, ending right around Labor Day.
2. Week for Isle Royale hike with some friends of ours, and my wife even is talking about going(!) around July 4th
3. Week for High Adventure; possibly a Pictured Rocks National Shoreline hike/kayaking hybrid, although assuming I do go, my son and I will decide together what we're doing.  This would also be in late June; the week before my Isle Royale hike.  There's a lot of options, because it's the whole state of Michigan "All LDS Encampment High Adventure."

Now, the High Adventure trip may fall through or we may end up not doing it, and the Isle Royale trip might have unexpected complications.  But that's the plan now, anyway.

This leaves me with one week for my trip somewhere.  Here's some stuff I'm considering:

• Maybe an early trip, to make up for the fact that the schedule is already pretty slammed during the summer.  Maybe even as early as January/February to some place like Big Bend or Guadalupe Mountains National Parks, which is usually a good season to visit those places, actually.  I went to Big Bend ten years ago in Feburary, and half the time, I'm wearing a t-shirt (admittedly, the other half of the time I have a sweatshirt on.  And I slept in the lodge, not a tent.)  I could also fly out to Phoenix, visit my brother and his family, and do some stuff in the Supes or elsewhere in Arizona, for that matter.  By mid March, the crowds (such as they are) have already descended on these destinations, and by late March, they're already hot.
• A later spring (mid March to early May) trip to somewhere on the Colorado Plateau.  The Needles District of Canyonlands, maybe, plus some Moab and/or Grand Junction exploration.  There's actually so much to see here, and much of it can be broken up into several smaller trips rather than one big backpacking extravaganza, that I could really get a ton of interesting things done and really enjoy this (although spend more money on gas, and maybe a few extra hotel nights, compared to the way I normally do things.)
• Go back to the mountains in mid to late September like I did in 2017.  Maybe even hit the West Elks again and see Mill Creek, or Maroon Bells.  Although Sneffels and the Blue Lakes hike beckon, and the fall colors in the Sneffels area is notoriously beautiful.  Lots of options, but the slightly more southerly Colorado ranges are preferred because there's a better chance of better weather because of the latitude.  I'm actually going on the cruise the last weekend in August, so I have a relatively big window between the 4th of July weekend and the last week of August.  If I don't mind further breaking up my work schedule for the summer, I could also go in late July or early August to just about any Rockies destination I choose, come to think of it.  The Uintas or the Wind Rivers or the Beartooths or some of the other ones that I've noodled around with in the past and not ended up doing probably shoot to the top of the list in this scenario.

Quiet. Not before a storm

I haven't posted anything here since I did my post hike discussion several months ago.  To be honest with you, I'm not very motivated because I'm not going on a backpacking trip this year.  I've got too much other competing claims on my vacation—the family reunion I got roped into for my wife's side of the family for spring break (which I enjoyed more than I thought, although much of that was because the family reunion was relatively short and we got to go do a lot of our own stuff otherwise on this trip.  I also got a wicked bad cold and felt so sick that I thought I'd come down with strep throat.)  Then we've got a super-long trip to Hawaii coming up soon, and I've got to go support the stake high adventure—both because my wife is too anxious about my youngest son's Type I diabetes and his management thereof to let him go if I don't, but also because the stake is running high adventure this year, and I'm a counselor in the stake YM's organization.

And then, I'm also spending a few days here and there at other things, like the day I'll be at girls' camp, and stuff like that.  My vacation evaporated without leaving me any room for a backpacking trip.  I came really close to canceling my participation in the family reunion trip to make room for it, but I ended up not.  I've also threatened to see if I can pull something together in the desert for either Thanksgiving or Christmas break, although that will be very unpopular at home.  Actually, Christmas is a no-go because my oldest son and his (still new) wife will be coming over from Rexburg, and he's been missing us and home and feeling nostalgic in general, so I want to be there for him.

What does that mean for 2019, then?  We've got a family trip to Florida planned to see the new Star Wars Galaxy's Edge attraction (although if Star Wars movies don't stop sucking so hard soon, my enthusiasm for this will plummet.  I'm already pretty "meh" about DisneyWorld in general compared to where I was ten years ago.)  A good friend of mine has really stepped up his efforts to get an Isle Royale backpacking trip scheduled—which now, even my wife is threatening to maybe come on!  I'm a little guarded about this; although I think it'd be great if she was into backpacking, she does have a pretty gimpy knee, and I don't know that this means she'll start liking it.  For that matter, as terrible as it sounds, I don't know that I want her going on my backpacking trips with me.  I see a lot of her as it is, naturally, since she's my wife.  And as an introvert (who can admittedly run a pretty convincing extrovert subroutine on demand—for a while, anyway) who sometimes just needs some alone time to recharge, I've come to enjoy the solo trips in part because they're solo trips.  This Isle Royale trip may turn into a big deal; the friend who's trying to get us to go will probably also bring his wife, some of his kids, maybe his son-in-law, and it wouldn't even shock me to find out that he's ended up inviting more people by the time we get that far.

Not only that, I'm a fan of the American west in particular, and although a quiet little island national park in the middle of Lake Superior sounds nice, it's not really the kind of destination that I think of when I think of backpacking.

I've also got two and maybe all three of my brothers threatening to come along on my next backpacking trip out west, which would be fun, but also means that I'd have to work with them on an itinerary that might be tricky timingwise as it is.  So, I'm giving some consideration to holding on to enough vacation to do something here in 2019 too, but I don't know what it would be.  The one brother who's most wanting to come along is talking about the Teton Crest Trail, which is also something I'd love to do.  He's also, however, talking about some Southwest destinations, as he lives in the Phoenix area.  That opens up a different season of possibilities in Arizona, southern Utah, and even New Mexico, western Colorado or southern California.

Factory Butte near Capital Reef National Park in southern Utah, a potential October or November destination.

So, my plans are too up in the air for me to have too much to discuss, hence the quiet on the blog.  No "regular" hiking trip in 2018, and although I've got some fun outdoorsy things planned, they aren't the same kinds of things that I normally do, nor are they likely to "scratch the same itch" so to speak.  2019 is, so far, looking like the Isle Royale is the most certain to happen, with another western trip high on my priorities, but requiring a big of work to make sure it happens.

In another four years, Young Desdichado #1 will be in his late mid-twenties, four years married, probably out of school and likely with a toddler or baby (or even more than one) in tow.  Young Girl Desdichado #2 will be mid-twenties, hopefully closing in on marriage and/or a career or some kind of settled future, and therefore not a source of immediate worry.  Young Desdichado #3 will be wrapping up or having just wrapped up his mission and going off to college, probably in Rexburg too, and Young Desdichado #4 will have just left on his mission too.

That might be a good time for me to take a sabbatical from work, if I can afford it and figure out the Byzantine paperwork required, and do something big and dramatic like hike the Arizona Trail, or something like that for 6 weeks or however long it takes.  I can probably do half of that with vacation, and only take a month-long sabbatical.  Heck, if that works out well, I might want to think, a couple years or so further down the line, about the PCT or CDT even.

New Patagonian National Parks

Big news in the National Parks front from Chile.  Quoting a few selections from the Forbes article on the subject:

The Tompkins Foundation [donation] of one million acres will help form a network of 17 national parks along Patagonia that spans most of Chile. This donation will aid efforts in "rewilding" Patagonia, an effort to roll back decades of development and deforestation. The Chilean government agreed to pledge an additional 10 million acres under Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. This expansion will create five brand new national parks and add acreage to other parks, creating what is called the "Route of Parks" running North-South along Chile. The total 11 million acres of protected national park land is larger than Denmark and three times larger than Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks in the US combined. 

The expanded parks are anticipated to aid in Chile's ecotourism, generating an estimated $270 million per year in revenue and providing over 40,000 jobs to locals. The new protected areas include a diverse collection of ecosystems from deserts to volcanoes to rainforests. With this addition of national park acreage Chile climbs the ranks in countries with the highest percentage of protected land, comparable in percentage to Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen (at least by me; I couldn't find anything anywhere) exactly what these parks will be, what their maps will be, what services and infrastructure they will offer, etc.

But most likely, it will increase the ability of hikers to go and visit them.  And heck; there may well be a Patagonian Andes traverse someday that allows thru-hikers to cross from one to another to another.

EDIT: I should note that the comparison to Yellowstone is, of course, flawed and kind of silly.  Yellowstone is a national park, of course, but it doesn't exist in isolation.  In fact, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) which includes both Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park is also surrounded by national forests and federally designated Wilderness Areas, which are more restrictive (although they sometimes overlap) than national parks anyway.  The total GYE protected land area is 12 million acres, compared to the Chilean total of 11 million.

So the comparison to Yellowstone is—while technically correct—actually so woefully obtuse as to possibly be deliberately dishonest.  Certainly the comparison should have the opposite conclusion as the writers make.  Whether that is because of the writer's ignorance of the rest of the protected areas in the GYE, or if it's being deliberately omitted to create a Narrative is unclear.