Author’s Note: This is part 3 of a 4 part post. It’s split up so that the enormous number of photos doesn’t make it impossible for them to load on your computer. If you want to go to the first post, you can find it here.
DAY FOUR – MANSARD TRAIL
And on the day after, Gabe rested. That day in South Coyote Buttes wore me out! So, for the next day, I decided to just do a simple out and back trail right near town. This one, the Mansard trail, led up to a set of thousand-year-old petroglyphs which turned out to be pretty spectacular.
It’s a pretty basic hike up there, a slow series of switchbacks from the valley floor up to the top of a mesa, but with some nice views of the surrounding area.
At the top there’s a dirt road where I encountered some folks in ATVs heading in the same direction as I was. I decided to give them some space and stopped for a snack, so just as I was arriving to the petroglyph area, they were leaving. I was glad of my decision as I heard them laughing and joking about the art being unimpressive. I can understand not being interested in ancient cultures, but this just had a tinge of racism and lack of appreciation of history that didn’t sit right with me.
Anyhow, they left and I went on to the end of the trail where I encountered a high cliff where ages of rain had carried a red iron stain down onto the white rock. (I was told by a guide that the rain bleached the rock, but given the way this is stained, I think the opposite here.) I love the creeping lightning-like pattern and veins of color this process leaves behind.
At the end of the cliff, a huge overhang made a small cave with a wonderfully smooth floor…
This is where the petroglyphs are.
There were all sorts of interesting things, from a clearly identifiable hunter with a bow to a series of geometric patters and an interesting trench-like set of canals dug into the rock. (Here’s just a small sample…)
The 5 miles or so up and back was enough for me after the previous day’s crazy activity, so I went back to town to rest for a bit. But that night, I had a great reunion with my buddies from the previous day. Dani, Irina, and Michele invited me to their temporary home, a ginormous “fifth wheel camper” that a friend who lived in Kanab was letting them stay in. This thing was crazy. It’s the size of an RV, but has a decent-sized living room (two couches, big screen tv), a kitchen (with a dishwasher?!), a bedroom, two bathrooms (!!!), and a giant closet. Pretty deluxe for something you can drag with you down the highway!
Anyhow, they treated me to an excellent home-cooked meal. Dani evidently makes a bit of money when traveling by cooking for some high end clients. I’m not exactly that, but I enjoyed the meal all the same! We also spent some time looking at each other’s photos (projected on the giant screen) from the day before and Michele introduced me to “Relive” which is a cool app for integrating maps and photos. All in all, a fun night!
DAY FIVE – WHITE POCKET
After the excellent experience in South Coyote Buttes, I knew I had to get out to see some of the other highlights of the backcountry in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument. So, for Day 5, I joined a guided group to get out to “White Pocket,” an area I had been experiencing vicariously through the eyes of a photographer whose posts keep showing up on Facebook for me. (Facebook has figured out I like pretty pictures from the desert.) Two days earlier, Irina’s 4WD skills had gotten me as far as Cottonwood Cove, the trailhead we used to enter South Coyote Buttes. Today, with Annabelle (my guide) and three other hikers, we went just about 5 miles further east, but it was it’s own unique spot.
(Side note: you may have noticed from these maps that all of this is actually just on the Arizona side of the border…not in Utah. Whatever.)
The three other hikers in the car with me were nice. A mom and her college age son with his best friend. The two boys were pretty serious climbers, so we chatted about that, and all three had spent significant time exploring the area, so we compared notes on various hikes, which was nice. But, I didn’t click with them like my companions from the day before. The guide, Annabelle, was more interesting. She clearly loved climbing and canyoneering and such, but she mostly seemed wistful for her days as a circus acrobat in Hawaii. (Sounds like a reasonable thing to look back on fondly, right?)
Annabelle “guided” with a light touch. Basically getting us to the parking lot and then wandering around with us and generally pointing out a few of the nicer features, but giving us lots of time to run around and explore on our own. And White Pocket was pretty fun to explore…
You drive across fairly flat desert for miles (with occasional buttes and mesas sticking up here and there) to arrive at this small patch of incredibly twisted rock. While the Coyote Buttes area sprawls over thousands of acres, White Pocket is only about one square mile, but that one square mile holds enough twists and turns to explore for days. It’s a slowly undulating mass of scaly grey-white rock with occasional gashes in that top layer that expose beautiful pinks and reds beneath.
Approaching from the parking area, White Pocket looks something like this.
So, some interesting looking shapes, but overall, kinda blah, right?
As we started to explore, Annabelle explained that the name, White Pocket, comes from the fact that the rolling form of the ground here forms small “pockets” where water pools when it rains. This was useful to cattle ranchers in the area. So, if the “white pockets” are the pockets that capture water, shouldn’t it be called “White Pockets,” plural? Only time can tell where the original “s” in the name disappeared to…
By the way, in the first photo above, did you see the one tree there? Annabelle says they call it “lone pine” because, shockingly, it’s the only one in the area. The interesting thing is, it’s not just the only one in White Pocket, or even in the general vicinity. It’s the only one for miles around. It’s a variety of pine that grows on the Kaibab Plateau above the Grand Canyon, a good 20 miles southwest of White Pocket at a much higher, much wetter, altitude. Somehow one seed made it way over here and found just enough water to grow.
And the fourth photo? That’s a spot where some ranchers built a small dam (back in 1929) to keep more water in for their cows. It’s filled with muck now. Ick.
Anyhow, the general terrain of white pocket is, as the name suggests, white and greyish. The rock has been carved over time into a series of scaly bumps, each a couple of feet across. My group spent some time coming up with different ways to describe this look: “brain rock” was the most popular term, “turtle shell” works, “dragon scales” is ok, someone said “pock-marked,” but I likened it to a “turtle orgy” since it just went on and on in every direction, something like this…
…though you can see in many places it was carved away and the oranges, pinks, reds, and yellows beneath were exposed.
This layered effect gives White Pocket some of the awesome swirling multi-colored look that I found in South Coyote Buttes. But here it was more stark, the colors less warm. More greys and browns, less oranges. More dusty pink, less soft yellows. Still, there were amazing shapes and colors all around.
One of the weirdest formations looked like an ice cream cone from some angles, or perhaps a locomotive spewing smoke from others.
Another fan favorite (me being the fan) was this “dragon back” formation that created a scaly red ridge running through the middle of White Pocket.
Right in the center of the White Pocket area was one of the cooler features, a deep firey-red slot called “the Wormhole.”
When we came out at the bottom of the Wormhole, we encountered some of the best examples of a phenomenon I saw in several places around White Pocket. In many places there were clear pink- and white-striped layers. But, in these unique spots, those layers became checkerboards. Why? Earthquakes caused the rocks to shift and split. I loved these.
A little farther on, the layers took a stark 90-degree turn.
This allowed Annabelle to teach us some camera tricks. She led the rest of my group over to this spot…
…then took these photos of them lying on the ground…
…and told us to turn them 90-degrees, so they looked like this:
Mine looked like…
I’m a crazy mountain climber! Well, I am. But not that crazy.
You may have noticed in some of the photos above, that, unlike the sprawling maze of South Coyote Buttes, White Pocket was very limited in scope. It really did have some stark edges where the rock just stopped and the sandy desert began.
Overall, a pretty awesome day of exploring. Not as adventurous, not as beautiful, not as enticing to go back, but still pretty amazing and absolutely unique.
(The next, and last, post in this set has some awesome slot canyon photos. You know you wanna see those, right?)
Loved the photos of climbing – nice scenery and description of the 5th wheel