Throughout the first morning we followed the track of a dry river down the pleasant canyon. By the time lunch arrived we had discovered that it contained quicksand and several people will tell you that quicksand is fun to play in but Mike has some advice about keeping your sandals securely fastened, he still has one somewhere deep inside a bog in fence canyon. A few hours after lunch the river sensed that we were nearing our campsite and made an attempt to swallow two of us.
Splashing down the ankle deep creek we soon came to the river, its silty waters covered a mixture of rock and sand that was mostly knee deep. During the course of the trip we crossed the river about two dozen times and walked nearly a quarter mile long stretch in it, avoiding the deep spots where it dropped to over four feet deep. Splashing and wet feet were the rule, most people couldn't even get their boots dry after the first day. We pushed through hours in the river to meet our camp which was a hundred feet from the rushing water on three sides.
The fact that the canyon was nearly devoid of trails had made our day ... soaked. Even several hours in the sun and a night in a tent couldnt revive my boots from their drowned state. And we knew that as soon as we left the next day we would be obliged to soak our feet in the stream that rumbled in our dreams.
The benefits of the trip were mostly realized on the third day when we traveled with daypacks up neon canyon. Its narrow walls were perhaps thirty feet apart and over a hundred feet wide, they were colored with these large vertical black markings that supposedly glowed in the afternoon and evening sun. At the end of the canyon we encountered the golden cathedral, a huge rock overhang with a dry waterfall, a large pool of water and three openings to the canyon above.
The hardest part of a canyon trip is always the exit but the view from about two thousand feet above the Escalante river was earned with relatively little effort the next morning and upon reflection it was a successful, if rather short, trip in a beautiful place.
We hiked from Harris Wash to the Escalante River and down to our Fence Canyon exit. The whole trip was done in the Escalante/Grand Staircase National Monument and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and access was obtained through a BLM permit obtained at the Interagency Office in Escalante, UT.
