Over the long Thanksgiving weekend in November 2006, Tracy and I took a kayaking trip to Lake Powell. This was an incredible trip. Even though it was the end of November, the day-time highs were in the mid-60s. We rented two sea kayaks from REI in Salt Lake on Wednesday, then drove down to Mount Carmel and stayed the night. We got up on Thanksgiving and drove to Page, AZ, where, of course, all the restaurants were closed. So we went on to Antelope Point and put in there.
We paddled about 6 miles up to the mouth of Warm Creek Bay. It was about 1:30 pm, and I was a little worried about not having enough time to make it through the canyon on the lake up river from Warm Creek before it got dark, so we found a camp site at the mouth of Warm Creek. We hiked around a little from the campsite and did some reading. The next morning we packed up and paddled about 8 miles to Labyrinth Canyon. This was a really cool slot canyon, and we really enjoyed paddling it. We saw a big owl in the canyon, and lots and lots of fish feeding off the surface. The slot canyon was just quiet, calm and really nice. Unfortunately, the weather forecast had started calling for high winds starting Saturday night. Not wanting to deal with that, we went ahead and paddled back to our campsite from the night before. We tried to find another site on the way back, but there just wasn’t anything. So we ended up back at the same site (much to Tracy’s dismay), and just tried to rest from a 17 mile day of paddling on the lake. We stayed up late and star gazed…I love the night desert sky.
Then we got up on Saturday and paddled back to Antelope. On the way back we encountered a couple of the tourist sightseeing boats…those things easily produce four-foot swells. That was a LOT of fun. But we ended up cutting the trip a day short because of the predicted bad weather. Of course, by the time we made it back to the car they had pushed the bad weather back to Monday. I don’t think they really know how to predict the wind out there. But we didn’t get back to Salt Lake until late on Saturday, so I think it was better the way we did it. But this was really a great trip. We learned that when we go back next time we would rather rent the kayaks down there and not have to worry about driving them all over the state, and we would like to try to get a boat shuttle further up river so we can explore more of the slot canyons.
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