Easter 2015: Pandora's Box

Cole, Dani, and Myself planned Easter weekend in Capitol Reef. Easter weekend is Spring Break for Dani, and we are starting a tradition of making it an adventure. Last year we descended Fisher Creek outside of Moab to the Dolores River and floated back to Dewey Bridge in packrafts.

Day 1 we started with a morning hike through the Grand Wash, which is a beautiful hike that can start from Highway 24 just east of the park visitor center.

Next we planned to drive the entire Cathedral Valley Loop, which is an approximately 60 mi dirt road that loops through some of the less visited areas of CR NP. The first pictures above is of the Bentonite Hills, and made us think that we were visiting Mars.

Next stop on the loop was Jailhouse Rock the Entrada sandstone cliff seen looming below in the photo. Large rocks never break off of these cliffs, note the lack of talus, instead the soft sand gradually erodes. The white/green top layer of the cliff band is Curtis Sandstone. Dani just finished her Geology unit.

We hiked down into the valley to be a bit closer, check out this photo for scale.

More of Jailhouse rock from an sand dune.

Cathedral Valley is the namesake of the road/area of the park and for good reason. It sports similar but more frequent Entrada sandstone cliff bands like the Temples and Jailhouse rock. Cathedral Valley is about 30 miles out from the Highway 24 turn-out and river crossing. There is a campground here with 6 basic sites.

Close up of the Entrada sand castles.

Cole and Dani stand on the edge of a giant sinkhole.

Gypsum Sinkhole and surround area.

Below is probably the most photographed area of Capitol Reef the Temple of the Sun. Also near the Temple of the Sun is the Glass Mountain. More like a glass mound this unique geological feature should not be missed. The glass mountain is made out of Gypsum (selenite) deposited long ago when this area was an inland sea. In this particular location the lower levels of Gypsum has been pushed up through cracks in the surface layers.

On Saturday we planned to do Pandora's Box Slot Canyon. While the purpose of our trip was the Cathedral Valley Loop, the thing that we had become the most excited about was the slot canyon. Dani and I did our first slot canyon, Pine Creek, in Zion last October, and planned to make 2015 the year of slot canyons. Pandora's Box entered the discussion after reading some awesome trip reports from the canyon. Initially, I did not want to try the canyon, due to my fear of small spaces and general fear of becoming stuck in some cold dark place far away from sunlight and openness. However, we had a good group for the trip and I had decided that being afraid/uncomfortable with something was not a good reason, while watching Radical Reels adventure movies.

Above, Dani prepares gear for the first rappel, with the maze of sandstone to be descended in the background.

Dani on the rope.

Impressive narrows, but nothing as narrow as some of the sections that required squeezing through long sections of narrows, down climbing short drops with stem moves, and stemming up an over impossibly passable narrows. A lot of the time we did not take the camera out in these tight sections, because adrenaline was high and we were just trying to solve the next obstacle.

Before the final rappel we re-fueled for the first time. Exhausted and very happy to know we were mostly finished. The final rap is awesome. Seen below its 150 feet into an amphitheater of red rock.

After the final rappel are 9.2 miles of hiking through Spring Canyon to Chimney Rock. We started at 7  AM and finished the technical section around 3-4 PM. We did not reach the road until 9 PM, and did a little full moon hiking. We also stuck our ropes on the last rappel, which was a fortunate place to stick a rope and has been a good learning experience. In fact, some awesome person came through on Sunday and hauled our ropes out, contacted us via the interweb, and we are going to meet up soon in Grand Junction! People are awesome!

Spring Canyon on the way out. Below, some GoPro pictures from the Slot Canyon and a video that does a better job of capturing the confined feeling of the slot.

Sunday we visited the Captiol Gorge area of the NP. This required a very scenic drive from the visitor's center south to the parking area and a short 1.5 mile hike to an area called the "Tanks". The hike through Capitol Gorge is a wide wash, and the "Tanks" area has incredible views of the higher sandstone terrain that rises above the park.