The weekend of 28 Dec 07, we headed down to southern Utah to get away from the snow. The plan for Saturday was to hike Straight Wash into the San Rafael Reef. The typical trailhead is off Hwy 24 but I thought I’d try the opposite end of the canyon off Interstate 70. Unfortunately, that end was snowy…so much for getting away from the snow. We hiked almost 3 miles in and the whole way we were just in a snow covered valley where you could still hear the interstate. We eventually just decided we weren’t having fun and headed back out. After leaving, we drove around the back side of the Reef, which was really cool. We ended up at Goblin Valley State Park, and we hiked around for a couple of hours down in the valley. We then drove to Bell Canyon and walked around until it got dark. We than drove out into the desert and did some star gazing with our new star map. On Sunday we headed to the Angel Landing trail at the Robber’s Roost area outside of Hanksville. We hiked down to the Dirty Devil River, and that whole area was just really nice. This was probably the biggest, most remote, slickrock area we have found, and it was really cool. I really liked this place, and I plan to go back and hike a lot of the Robber’s Roost Canyon. We didn’t see another person out here and the hiking was just great. The Dirty Devil was partly frozen and it was fun listening to the ice break apart as the day warmed up…it sounded like a freight train when it started flowing down the river. We also had some good challenges climbing up the slickrock, and you can see from some of the pictures that we were on some precipitous drops. The Robber’s Roost area was definitely worth frequenting.
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