The Most Spectacular Hike Ever- The Full Story

Exhilarated. It's funny how leaving camp at four o'clock in the morning does that to me. I seriously don't need to sleep when I'm out on my road trips, but of course that means once I get home I crash, and crash hard. This particular morning found my friend Cat and I leaving our campground in Moab, UT at a horrendously early hour to try to get started on the day's hike before the sun came up, with the goal of finishing the hike before the desert turned into a furnace. We drove two hours to the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park in complete darkness. No street lamps, hardly any other vehicles on the road, with only the stars and a sliver of moon. Highway, then paved park road, then a somewhat white-knuckled one lane dirt road that wound around blind corners and dipped in and out of dry desert washes. It was a silent drive, with Cat not quiet awake yet and me not wanting to break her daze with my excitement.

Part of our trail

I'm totally a morning person, but I know how irritating chatter can be when you're not fully awake, so we sat in silence and sipped coffee as she tried to wake up and I drove toward our highly anticipated hike. I knew that as soon as the car stopped we were in for 11 miles of hiking through slick rock spires and domes to the attractions of the day: Chesler Park, and beyond that, The Joints.

Sunrise turns purple shadows into blazing beacons

Canyonlands National Park is divided into four sections, which must be accessed separately from each other. The day's trail was located in the second most popular district, The Needles, which is my personal favorite. When I was researching our Moab trip I stumbled across several Pins on Pinterest that absolutely caught my eye; Pins of both The Joints and Druid Arch. I dug a little deeper into both destinations, and decided we had to go there. I'll write about our Druid Arch hike later, but for now let me just thank whoever put that picture of The Joints on the internet. I have hiked quite a bit, but never to a more astounding destination.

Just before Chesler Park

We started our hike in the pre-dawn silence of the desert, each with a flashlight in hand. Once again we played "touch the carin" before we moved on, especially because it would have been simple to lose the trail in the darkness. Dawn found us moving across a sandstone landscape muted by shadows of the night, until the sun peaked over the mountains in the distance and we were suddenly surrounded by the fiery oranges and dazzling whites that I associate with my desert. Then we noticed the clouds.

Cat checking things out at dawn

Not the wispy clouds high in altitude, or the big puffy clouds that you can see shapes and animals in, but big, grey, looming clouds that threaten rain. Rain in the desert is awesome, it's what carves streams and gullies into canyons. But it's not awesome when the trail you are hiking on crosses and sometimes follows creek beds and desert washes that are usually dry but can turn into walls of water taller than a person when there's rain upstream. Cat and I had a serious decision to make: continue on and take the risk, or turn back? We decided to keep going, but also keep an eye on the sky. Then we climbed over a sandstone fin and got our first look at Chesler Park. Um, wow.

Chesler Park. 

We spent way more time in that fantastic natural amphitheater than I thought we would. How could we move on when we were completely surrounded by hundreds of red and white sandstone needles, the namesake of the district? There were even some little purple, yellow and white wildflowers in bloom among the grasses of the ring. A lot of people backpack to the area and camp in one of several primitive sites, and I really wish we would have done so as well. At least I have a plan for next time! We had forgotten about the threatening clouds, but once we put our eyeballs back in our heads we looked up and decided we could risk continuing. We were almost to The Joints, and we had gotten that far, we might as well continue!

Entrance to The Joints. Seriously!?!?

We hiked on and in what felt like no time the trail in front of us descended into a crack between two sandstone domes, and vanished. I was so damn excited I nearly tripped down the cut stairs as we finally reached our destination. The Joints!
I have no words accurate enough to describe this place. It was astounding. Slipping through cracks (joints) between sandstone blocks just big enough to slide sideways through, pushing our packs ahead or dragging them behind us. Sometimes the joint opened wide at our heads, sometimes at our knees. Usually we walked on soft sand, but several times we had to scramble up, down or around boulder jams. There was even one place we had to use a log cut into a primitive ladder to get down a level that was too high to jump. Have I ever mentioned that I hate ladders? Cat had to talk me through my climb down, telling me precisely where to put my feet and hands. And I don't have a problem with rock climbing. How do I figure that?

Ladders. The bane of my existence.

Pick a path, any path

We explored every single crack and crevice big enough for us to fit our bodies through. We climbed up boulder jams to see over the tops of the sandstone that entombed us. We climbed down into dark little holes beneath boulders half the size of houses that nearly qualified as caves. We found a couple of actual caves that we explored with flashlights. There was a joint filled with carins left by previous explorers like ourselves. There was a joint that ended in a fifty foot drop into a wash that lead away into more needles. Hardly any direct sunlight penetrated deep enough to where we were, yet everything was lit by the glow from the red and white sandstone that had become our playground. We spent over an hour exploring off trail, had our lunch, rested up and finally took our leave. We got back out into the sun. And then remembered the clouds.

Clouds above the desert

Happily, the clouds had held off, but were dumping rain over the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands. We set off on the loop that would take us back around Chesler Park, and from there we would get to our car. We hiked more slowly on our way back, partly because we were tired from our exploration of The Joints, and partly due to the heat of the afternoon. It had been cool in the shade of The Joints, but out in the desert with little shade the full force of the sun was staggering. We stopped wherever there was shade, and each of us drank almost three liters of water apiece. Also, the clouds were advancing again. We finally clambered down the hill toward my car eight hours after we left it, and we were relieved to get our packs off and refresh with ice cold water from the coolers. We left the trail head exhausted and ecstatic, and to top it all off? As soon as we finished a little sight-seeing along the paved road on the way out of the park the clouds moved in and opened up, and we were treated to a spectacular desert thunderstorm. There is nothing like rain in the desert.

Thundershower!

What I'm listening to: Inside Information by Howard Shore