Last fall, we traveled down to our usual haunt, Moab. This time, instead of whizzing past everything along the way, we explored the glorious regions in-between. Scrumptious sandy cream fillings should not be skipped.
Southern Utah is spectacular in the fall, but its daylight is short lived. Since Jason and I knew we would have limited sun by the time we neared Moab, we opted to stop on our way into town at Black Dragon Canyon in the San Rafael Swell. Never heard of the San Rafael Swell? Before this outing, I was familiar with the name but not the experience. Now I know it is a dome of shale, limestone, and sandstone that was thrust up 40-60 million years ago and later eroded into countless gulches, gullies, hoodoos, badlands, and buttes. As implied, we had never been to the Swell in all its 60 million years until that autumn afternoon.
Now that we’ve established what the San Rafael Swell is, let’s confront the Black Dragon. Yes, there’s a place called Black Dragon Canyon. As we are nerds, I’m going to assume you don’t need an explanation as to why this particular spot held greater appeal for us, and I’ll just move on. A 4×4 trail runs through the canyon. Along it, some rather remarkable scarlet pictographs can be accessed half a mile up via vehicle or foot. In the 1940s, someone chalked a group of them to transform them into a dragon (a damaging practice), hence the canyon’s moniker. These pictographs were created in Barrier Canyon Style, a category of rock art found primarily in eastern Utah mostly originating 1,500 to 7,000 years ago. Near these bright and larger-than-life figures, a wall of Freemont petroglyphs can also be seen dating back 1,000-1,500 years.
As we were examining these impressive panels, a hiker wandered by and told us of a cave at the top of some nearby scree piles amassed at the base of a cliff. Pass up a cave? Not Jason. We didn’t know if we would be able to find the entrance or, if we could, what we would find inside. It took some scrambling and exploring, but we located one of its small openings. The Dragon’s Lair (the cave’s unofficial name) was formed when the mouth of a deep alcove collapsed. Its cramped entries are at odds with its contents. It’s a spacious, slanted, dust-filled cavern that angles down as a winding trail runs through it. Although I am not often a cave fan, I’d say this one is worth the clamber and search required to find it.
The Dragon’s Lair proved quite engrossing, and nightfall crept up on us quickly. Hence, we turned around at a popular stopping point half a mile from the other entrance into the canyon. Since this trail is mostly flat, we were able to move speedily and only had to use headlamps for about 0.5 miles of our return. In the end, we ended up hiking 5.4 miles.
If you too would like to visit the Black Dragon and its lair, turn off 1-70 at mile marker 147 and take the gated dirt road. You’ll do a quick left, and then travel about another mile to the start of the canyon. If you have a high-clearance vehicle, you can drive through the canyon, but why bother with tires when you have perfectly adequate feet?
With the limited supply of daylight considered, we debated the best hike for our next day. We chose the first half of the Lathrop Trail in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park. The Lathrop Trail is passed by all visitors heading into Island in the Sky shortly after the visitor center, yet it doesn’t seem to interest many of them. We saw one or two groups our entire journey. For that perfect combo of a people shortage and a scenery excess, my feet are ever at the ready! Why does this path not get more foot action? I have no idea. Its panoramas are as delicious as anywhere else in the park.
If you are ambitious, Lathrop can be taken for a 10-mile-roundtrip trek to the White Rim Road. If you’re very ambitious, it can be taken 10 miles one way to the Colorado River. It is the only path in Island in the Sky that reaches the river. However, we were not very ambitious or even ambitious. We opted to just walk five miles to a stunning and daunting viewpoint overlooking the White Rim and Canyonlands’ desolate expanse. The section we completed was relatively flat. Had we continued, we would have had to navigate a scree field that drops 900 feet in less than one mile. Yes, we picked our turnaround point prudently… due solely to the limited daylight of course.
Beyond the delight of being on top of the world with a matchless, barren paradise spread out beneath me, I loved this path because of the varied terrain it wanders through. It starts in rolling grasslands called Grays Pasture and then zigzags through a city of Navajo sandstone domes. Eventually, it passes through gravelly scrub and sand on its way to sheer sandstone cliffsides textured by rock rubble. Grays Pasture is the widest part of the flat mesa top on which Island in the Sky sits, reaching a width of about two miles. Gazing around this meadow, you’d never guess you were 1,000 feet up from the canyons on both sides, but you certainly appreciate that fact when you hit the canyon’s rim.
After Lathrop, we didn’t have time for another hike, but we decided to do the two miles to the Grand View Point and back anyway. We had to navigate most of our return in the dark, which was generally easy with our headlamps and the giant cairns along the trail. We did get confounded in a couple spots but managed to not remain permanently lost or stumble off a cliff.
On our way home the next day, we stopped at two spots. The first, Crystal Geyser, wasn’t far off the beaten path, but we had never bothered to take the 15-minute drive from I-70 to see it. Crystal Geyser is the strange result of natural and manmade endeavors. Unlike most geysers, it is powered by cold not hot water; steam is not involved but pressurized CO2 gas. Crystal Geyser is one of the most famous of these rare cold-water geysers and was created in 1935 when oil seekers drilling an exploratory well hit an aquifer saturated with high quantities of CO2 2,600 feet down. The geyser typically erupts every 8 to 27 hours. Sadly, we didn’t witness an eruption, but I don’t regret deviating anyway. It was uncanny to observe what seemed like a natural wonder coming from a pipe in the ground. You could hear the same whooshing activity in its vents as the geysers in Yellowstone. Likewise, it had a similar sulfur smell and series of travertine pools surrounding it. Occasionally, when humans interfere with Mother Earth the results can be beautiful… and apparently explosive.
Next, we paused to check out Spirit Arch in the same section of the San Rafael Swell we visited on our way down. Unlike the path through Black Dragon Canyon, the trail to Spirit Arch is solely for hiking. It goes down two short ravines in a Y shape, Petroglyph Canyon and Double Arch Canyon. One has, as you’d expect, two arches collectively called Spirit Arch. That gully ends in an alcove with abrupt stone walls on three sides. Spirit Arch can be seen high in one of these. While the arches are nifty, they are too far away to examine closely. In my opinion, they are overshadowed by the understated exquisiteness of the canyon’s striped sandstone and graceful curved walls.
The petroglyphs in Petroglyph Canyon were not easy to locate even with the blog posts we found about finding them. They are not at the very end of the canyon as some online information suggests but near the end on the right side. The short side trail that leads to them doesn’t look like a real path, so it is easy to miss. They aren’t large but are quite distinct. What I thought most interesting about this panel were the lines of tracks the artist took the time to carve for each animal and human depicted. This two-canyon trail was two miles of easy hiking, but it took us about two hours to complete because we stopped often to appreciate our surroundings. We didn’t see anyone else the entire time.
We’ve wisely realized that Moab shouldn’t be our only destination when we go to Moab. There is so much to experience and appreciate between here and there. I’d wager we will find more enroute distractions with each visit whether there be dragons, wild horses, or sailor’s heads.