Adventure Is Out There! Review of Moonshine Wash

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Several months ago, when COVID-19 was going on but national parks were opening up, I wanted to get out into the great outdoors worse than anything. I usually travel and camp and spend a lot of time in nature, and thanks to covid, this year my time outdoors was pretty much confined to walks around the park. Not only that, but everyone and their fifteen dogs flooded the national parks as soon as they opened, so not only did I not feel comfortable going, but it didn’t seem like it would be fun to go even if I did (hours-long lines to get into the parks? Nope). So I did some research to find more remote camping/hiking locations, and Moonshine Wash stood out. Decent-length hike, not too long of a drive (relatively speaking), “lightly trafficked.” Check, check, check.

In September, we finally made it happen! We did (and we would recommend you do) some legwork before to make sure we had downloaded the area in Google Maps in case we lost service, as well as putting pins at several points in the hike to make sure we wouldn’t lose our way and die in the Utah desert. On a Friday, we headed down, armed with a camping stove per fire warnings and plenty of water and TP since this would be a wild camping experience. PSA: there are no amenities down there. There is nothing. Bring everything you need.

The drive down—very smooth. Once we hit Green River, we made a couple of turns through the town, the last one being off the road heading to the airport, and then drove south for about an hour on a dirt road. We passed through some badlands that were shades of purple, white, and gray, and then emerged into the more traditional redrock setting. There’s a turn to take up to the trailhead for Moonshine Wash (the sign to turn at is Three Canyons; don’t turn at the Moonshine Wash sign). The new road is mostly fine but has some bumpy parts that made it sketchy with a Corolla. We pulled off to the side of the road and camped. We got shockingly good phone service for how remote we were. Guess it was the whole lotta nothing around to block the signal.

The weather was perfect! I suspect it would have been crazy hot earlier in the year (total exposure, no shade anywhere) and very cold as the winter came on, but September was a good time. We got to enjoy a gorgeous desert sunset atop a nearby large rock.. Oh, also, we had the entire area to ourselves. One car rolled past sometime after dark and camped pretty far away from us, but other than that, no one. I loved just sitting and listening to the silence. Our world’s never really quiet—even alone in your house, you’ve got the A/C, the clock, a bird outside, the dog next door, traffic in the distance. Here, minus the occasional flurry of wind, it was 100% still.

A man making me pancakes

The next day, we tackled the wash. Since our car couldn’t make it all the way to the trailhead, we walked an extra 2/3 of a mile to get to the pseudo-parking lot that starts the actual trail (the trailhead isn’t marked—I’d mark it on your GPS). We got lucky—there were some clouds, enough to provide shade but not threatening to make us reconsider hiking the wash, which includes a slot canyon.

The wash was great! Beautiful, cool. We had some drops as we got lower and lower, but nothing we needed technical knowledge for, just fun, “figure out how to get down” kind of drops. We ran into the other campers from the night before—a cute daddy-daughter combo. We also got to see the old sheep bridge that crosses the canyon. The hike was pretty chill until the midway point.

There were a few ways we could get back to the start of the hike. We could turn around and come back the way we came, we could climb out at a point we’d marked on our map from other people’s blogs and walk back along the top, or we could take a fork in the wash to double back the way we’d come and then climb out there to walk the remaining distance on top.

We went with option three because that seemed the most adventurous. And it was. Almost as soon as we took the fork, we were presented with a problem—a dryfall that wasn’t completely dry, divided from us by a decent-sized pothole of stagnant, bug-filled water and not a great handhold/foothold situation to get around it. We went wishy washy on it for a while, trying to figure out if it was worth it to press forward. Finally, we decided, screw it, let’s have an adventure. (BTW, a dryfall is like a waterfall but without the water.)

Bobby found a big stick we could use to balance ourselves, and I realized that there was a lip just under the water that we could probably use to walk on to cross. Off came the shoes, we got our pole jammed in good (in the picture, about half of the pole is under the water), and Bobby made it across. Then he javelined the pole back to me for my crossing. So far, so good.

Getting up the dryfall was terrifying. It was a crevice in the rock, and from the other side of the pothole, it looked like you could just walk up the sides by bracing yourself with your hands and feet, but up close, the angles of the rock just didn’t work. We ended up having to jam the sides of our feet into the crevice and kind of wedge our way up with the help of our hands. Bobby was still barefoot, and he bruised his feet. There came a point for both of us, separately, about halfway up, where we both kind of freaked a little, like “oh my gosh I don’t know if I’m going to make it I might slip oh my gosh!” But we did both make it, and sat at the top of the dryfall, nervously laughing and letting the adrenaline high subside. We thought that was going to be the worst thing there was. Haha . . .

We next made our way up a few large boulders—the opposite of the drops we’d done on the way into the wash earlier. That wasn’t too bad, but then we got to . . . a second dryfall.

First dryfall from the bottom

First dryfall from the top

2nd dryfall from above

This one also had a pothole below it. And unlike the other one, there was only wet, sploochy sand/mud to walk around to the side with the dryfall and then to stand on while trying to climb up. And the start of the dryfall’s wall was sheer—the crevice part didn’t start until about 4 feet up (the picture doesn't really do the height justice since we took it from higher ground). Then above the dryfall, we could see some large boulders blocking the way to what could have been the way out—or could have been another pothole filled with water. We tried so hard to see if there was water up there! If we’d known there hadn’t been, we probably would have tried to find a way to muscle through that second dryfall. But after a few failed attempts to climb the sandstone around us to get up and see (it turns out my bare feet aren’t quite as grippy as, you know, climbing shoes), we decided that the smartest thing was to head back. Which meant going down the freaky first dryfall.

Bobby claims going down wasn’t as bad as going up. I’m not so sure—I started slipping partway down because of the mud and water from our shoes/feet on the way up, and I didn’t know if I was going to slip and bash myself/ fall into the buggy water/etc., but thankfully, I didn’t, and we forded the pool again with the help of the stick that we’d conveniently left there. The rest of the hike back was uneventful, minus the strong wind that blew sand into our eyes (sunglasses became more than sun protection) and caused sand to shimmer down like rain as we went through the slot canyon. I have never been so sandy in my life, and definitely not so windblown in the desert. It was great, though! Even with the dryfall scare, five out of five stars. We loved this trip—definitely will be looking for more isolated hikes in the future.