April 18, 2013 Long Canyon, Utah

We discovered what looked like a nice slot canyon on the topo map, next to a dirt road. We drove up it and looked down into it yesterday, today we hiked it.

It was quite deep. About a mile long. This is where it boxes out at the end.

The walls of the canyon were actually white, the layer above was red and it dripped down and stained the white. The white is very soft, so pieces would fall out and the drippy stuff would start again. This is a HUGE beetle.

A side canyon came in up higher, this is it. John is the tiny dot in the second photo on the way back out.

The walls were covered with these moki or indian marbles. They form on the walls and drop off. Round marbles  tiny up to the size of my fist littered the bottom of the canyon.

John waiting patiently for me while I take photos. The canyon was not as deep in the lower portions.

Cool formations way up on top. We drove up the road, up above the box and looked down, the white stripe is the bottom below.

We hiked up above the box, it slotted out again, and boxed out again. More formations up above the canyon.

Lots of fun things in the canyon. What looked like a cow hip and lower spine, the head of some small mammal, and these other two, I don’t know if they died in place or someone put them there, but they looked like they were chasing each other across the streambed. The others are a huge bird nest in the side of the canyon, a curvy line in the canyon wall, a sort of Mick Jagger mouth and tongue, and grass that blew in the wind and made circles around itself.

On the way back we drove the dirt road to the Pahreah town site. Pahreah is Piute for muddy water. Pahreah was a Mormon settlement on the Paria (the name was shortened for the river) river. It was a prosperous farming community until it flooded and took the whole town out. They built a movie set on the old town site and filmed several movies. The movie set has since flooded away too.  The canyon had these brilliant colors.

The old Pahreah graveyard. The second photo is of the Chocolate cliffs. The Grand Staircase/Escalante national monument consists of several cliffs of different colors in stair steps up to the Kaiparowits Plateau.  Chocolate, vermillion, white, gray, pink—these are the chocolate. Name like that I wanted to jump out of the car and start licking them. . .

Flowers seen today.