Our 4 Day Hike from Wire Pass to Lee’s Ferry: Advice We Wished We’d Recieved

Five of us backpacked from Wire Pass, down the Buckskin, then down the Paria to Lee’s Ferry. We did it over four days, entering Wire Pass about 7:00 on May 10th, 2005. Perhaps my son, Ryan, said it the best: awesomely brutal and awesomely beautiful. If we had known just a few things the hike would have certainly been less brutal, allowing us to even take in more of the beauty. It seems the BLM didn’t want to give specific advice in case it didn’t work out. We’ll just be bold. I suppose someone could sue the BLM for bad advice. Don’t sue us. We don’t have deep pockets. We have no pockets. So here is our frank, bold advice. Do with it what you want.We are five reasonably fit people. We have varied backpack experience, including five Grand Canyon Hikes, the Guadalupe’s and many alpine trips. But the Paria hit us with some things we had never experienced before.

1. WATER: Walking in it. This spring was a very wet one for southern Utah. We were concerned about the depth of water in the Buckskin. It was, at deepest, between crotch and waist deep, depending on our height. And cold. But we should have been more concerned about the amount of water. Where some guidebooks describe no water for five miles, then some pools after that, we were in watery mud or muddy water throughout the Buckskin. What the guidebooks say is a 6 ½ to 7 ½ hour hike took us a long 12 hours. Down the Paria you will cross through the river time after time, less the further you go. But your feet will never be dry.
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The descriptive side of Buckskin Gulch

Entering Wire Pass, the sky overcast, a step into mystery, walking into a secret door, down into the unknown, into the unknowable. Our voices seem boisterously loud. As it joins the Buckskin it widens into a hushed gallery. Ancient petroglyphs adorn the right hand wall. Graceful big horns parade and scamper across the wall. Hunters chase them, leaping, shooting. A lone ram looks on from high above. As you make the turn the walls of the Buckskin narrow. They are dark, convoluted, whispering, beckoning onward, into the depths of sinew, of dark red muscle, its grain stretching on, frozen in stillness yet threatening to squeeze. Foreboding, as if leading to the shadow; chasms of doom to the gates of the dead. Yet the promise of hidden treasure, stored for ages, quietly calls from the pages of old storybooks read long ago in the dark of night, in the recess of childhood.

Curvaceous wall on the left answers to wall on the right, a continual counterpoint in sinuous stone. Call and response. Dancers to a slow hypnotic beat, rhythm established by the pace of your steps. Walls curving in, out; in, out; in, out. Then broken with a straight vertical fissure reaching high, higher, craning toward the narrow line of white sky. Then back to convoluted curves, hovering, calling in silence. Dark, dank, musk beauty.

The wind pushes its cold hand on your back, pushing along; then turning into your face, driving dust and grit, then turning to the back. Feet plodding on, stepping on and around stones, on sand, then sloshing again in to another pool of thin mud, seeking purchase, going deeper, chill on the thighs, back arching, the thought pleading, “no, not cold to there, not there…”, then gratefully rising up and out, not “there” this time, the gloomy passage beckoning silently onward, onward. And then a moment. A moment of light streaming downward, the hush of holiness, the holiness of a great temple, stunning into awe. Pausing, breathing, gaping up and around. Seeking a moment of warmth in the holy of holies. And then with a step, back to the dark, to the ominous tread.

You remember reading, “the Buckskin is the longest slot canyon in the world”. The longest. The longest. It’s beauty now going by un-noticed as fatigue dulls wonder, dulls awareness. It’s cold, and long. Wind to the front, wind from the rear. Companions now well ahead, well behind. You are alone. The gaze is downward now, watching the steps, the rocks, the sand, the mud. Then you notice the wings. Tiny wings, moth wings, laying delicately on the mud. The body is mysteriously snipped away, missing, cleanly snatched. Bats of the night? Swallows of day? White-lined Sphinx wings. No other moths. Just the sphinx. Dead wings a pattern of beauty, of geometry in the undulating background of wet, brown mud. What is their message? What do they say? Death awaits? The soul translated, lifted, taken? Taken to where? To new heights or to the dark inwards of wet decay? For a while you avoid stepping on them. Then the weariness takes over, step upon step, watching the footsteps of those who have gone on before.
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