The Loop

Fruita, Utah

38 16.926 N 111 14.911 W

 

Just yesterday I wrote that the drive up here was the best. Just hours later we found more. U described beauty we hadn't seen before. It risks making me a liar.

What we did was to take the 125 mile long loop road around the park. About 40 of those miles were on washboard dirt roads.

Heretofore, we have been very cautious. I regret not braving the freezing waters to hike up to the end of the narrows in Zion. I regret not having hiked the 1500 feet up to the rim. We regret.not daring to take the alternative "Hell's Backbone" road 70 miles from Escalante to Boulder. We regret not taking the dotted line dirt road over the top of the Escalante Staircase. This time a ranger told me that our Ford sedan (which is not for off road) would make it OK over the dirt roads. Time to be adventurous. Off we went.

The path took us down the center of the Waterbreak Fold; a 100 plus mile long fold in the Earth. Sheer cliffs on both sides and relatively flat but moist and green land in the middle set the scene. How great was it? We took over 200 pictures in 125 miles, stopping the car each time. We felt so isolated that we feared that if the car broke down, nobody would find our bodies. But after a while we saw several other cars, so the isolation was illusory.

To get out of the fold, we climbed 1500 feet of switchbacks in less than a mile.

We did forego one thing, at the bottom of the loop is Muley Twist Canyon. It is so called because the mule team drivers said that the mules had to twist to get around the sharp bends. But the round trip hike was 10 miles long. In the heat and midday sun we weren't willing to risk it.

The car did OK except that the AC stopped working. Uh oh. But when we got back to thepaved highway it started working again. I guess the computer shut off the AC to prevent the engine from overheating at low speeds and steep hills.

Below is an arial shot of the Waterbreak Fold