Kanab: The Windstorm, The Stuffed Dog, and The Burn
- patricecarey8
- May 31, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 1, 2021
It was sometime past midnight, and Bobby and I huddled in the tent that barely fit into the patch of dirt allotted to us by the RV park in Kanab. For once, I wasn’t cold while camping, and there was no squatting necessary when nature called—a bathroom was twenty steps away.
But I still wasn’t asleep.
Another gale crashed against the tent, catching the slightly loose rain fly and snapping it briskly.
It went on for an hour. Or maybe longer—who knows. My phone was dead and I didn’t have a watch.
At some point, tired and grumpy, I stumbled out of the tent to spend a few wind-free minutes in the bathroom. As I returned, Bobby blundered toward me, his glasses on and his expression mirroring my own exhaustion. He held up his arms, zombie-style, and I walked right into them. The wind howled around us, and elsewhere in the RV park, car tires ground against gravel.
“I bet that’s someone noping out of here,” Bobby said.
“Maybe we should do that too in the morning.” I hated saying that because this whole trip to Kanab had been my idea to take advantage of the week I got off work for spring break, and we were supposed to spend another day down here. So far, the trip had been fine but not amazing. To start, we’d entered the walk-in lottery for The Wave that morning. There were over a hundred people, mainly seniors with their windbreakers and walking sticks, doing the same thing. After the facilitator had rolled off a well-rehearsed speech about the rules and cheering loudly for whoever won, they had a lottery with real lottery balls. Cool, but unfortunately, we didn’t win (watch the video below to see the excitement over someone who did).
So with the Wave out, we went with our backup plan, Buckskin Gulch. The start of the hike was much more crowded than we expected, and due to a poorly timed lunch break, we got trapped at a ladder pinch point behind a few families with small kids. Luckily, the crowd tapered off after a few miles and got all quiet and echoey, living up to its reputation as the deepest slot canyon out West.
It was in the 80s on the surface, but down in that canyon, it was cold enough that I had to put my jacket on when the shady stretches went on for too long. There were some pretty cool formations in the rock as well as areas where trees and rocks and crap had got stuck like some giant bird had nested there.
So not what we’d been hoping to do that day, but still cool. You could go as far as you wanted in before turning around, and we ended up doing nine miles. It was honestly pretty flat most of the way, but nine miles is nine miles, and by the time we drove to the taco place in town, we were wiped. When we got back to the tent, we hadn’t even had the energy to figure out what to do the next day. So now, standing in the middle of a windstorm, with no sleep on the menu and no plans to look forward to, going home looked like the most reasonable decision.
Bobby hugged me, then let go. “Let’s see how we feel in the morning.”
“All right,” I mumbled.
Well, the wind eventually died down enough that we got some sleep, and by the time I woke up the next day, I was in a much more hopeful mood. Over our standard camping breakfast of yogurt, granola, and berries, Bobby and I hashed out two possible options for the day: see a couple of small, probably crowded attractions on the main road home and get back that night, or take the scenic route by driving a 40-mile dirt road through the heart of Escalante Grand-Staircase, stop off at Kodachrome State Park and camp near Bryce, and go home the next day.
Bobby sat in the car and I leaned my hands on his knees.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
I smiled widely.
“You want to go the scenic route, don’t you?”
I nodded; he laughed.
“But we don’t have to,” I said quickly, “if you don’t want to.”
“Nah, let’s do it. Adventure,” he said.
And so, adventure-style, we headed east, toward the nowhere dirt road we’d be driving on. First up: we stopped off for a short detour hike to the Toadstools, a bunch of rock formations that looked—well, duh. Like toadstools. There were some beautiful color contrasts, and we climbed up onto a big rock to enjoy the atmosphere and take advantage of photogenic opportunities, which were many and varied. So. Much. Sandstone. The massive rock I was sitting on had cracks in it that, with an avalanche or something, would have reduce it to sand in a jiffy.
After our detour, we continued on the dirt road. Actually not as bumpy as expected! And, most importantly, it gave us the solitude we’d missed out on earlier in Kanab. There was no one in miles. We flipped onto an even smaller dirt road out to some random big rocks to eat our lunch in the shade, just because we could. (The sand there was incredibly—white and fine and soft. If it hadn’t been for the massive desert we were in, I could have believed we were at the beach.
Carrying on, we drove across the most beautiful stretch of Escalante land that we could imagine. All creamy lines marbled with bright red and massive orange rocks butted up against chalky white ones. You should definitely watch to the video and enjoy Doug (Bobby’s stuffed corgi) enjoying the scenery.
After an extra little detour to Grosvenor Arch—which I wondered about being named for my Grosvenor ancestors—the last major thing we hit was Kodachrome State Park. It’s just a little guy, and it’s graced with rock spires (not to be confused with toadstools, mushrooms, hoodoos, or any other southern Utah rock formations). We got there late and only hiked Angel’s Palace, but it was beautiful and gave us a view of the whole park. We also got to venture out on a terrifying little cliff, whose terrifyingness was magnified by a wide angle camera.
A nice little area off UT-12 provided a camping site for the night, and as I sat in my camping chair with s’mores over the fire, stars overhead, and no wind to disturb the peace, I was so happy that we’d chosen to stay another night.
As I moved my s’mores stick, it knocked one of the rocks of our impromptu fire pit out of position.
“Shoot!” Without thinking, I shoved the rock back in place. It took a moment for the burn to register—the rock had been forming the wall of the fire pit for an hour, taking in heat. I yanked my fingers away, yelping.
“Ooo, don’t touch that!” Bobby said. “It’s hot!”
“Yeah, I know that now.” I clenched my teeth as my finger throbbed. “I’m an idiot.”
“Get some water. You need to keep that cool.”
So that is how I spent the next several minutes with my fingers in a plastic cup. Which treatment, as you see below, only kind of worked. Well done, me. Don’t touch a hot stove, don’t touch a hot fire
pit—life lessons learned late.
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