Natural Bridges National Monument
Personal Notes
This page presents our personal notes on our visits to Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah.
| Saturday, October 11, 2003 | |
Saturday, October 11, 2003
We were staying in Blanding, Utah, and headed south on 163 to its junction with Highway 95, and headed west. The road is well marked to Natural Bridges National Monument, which is about 38 miles west of town.
Visitor Center
At the junction of 275 we turned into the Monument and stopped at the Visitor Center. It was about 9:00 a.m. They have a few exhibits, helpful Rangers, a gift shop, rest rooms, and free information. We also bought our annual Golden Eagle Pass, since ours had run out at the end of September. That cost us $65.00. The visitor's fee is usually $6.00 per vehicle.
Solar Panel Display
We walked the short paved path to the solar panel display. All of the power for the Monument comes from this one acre of solar panels. Pretty impressive. There is an audio display there that describes what you are seeing, how it works, and how they use the power generated.
Owachomo Bridge Overlook
We drove along the one-way loop road to the Owachomo Bridge Overlook, where we parked and left the Trooper. The weather was fallish and warm, and very comfortable for an outing. We hiked the two miles across the top of the mesa to the Sipapu Bridge parking area. The trail across the top passes through a typical juniper-pinyon environment, with lots of short ups and downs, some short sandstone cliffs, one wooden ladder, and across several exposed sandstone areas where you must use the cairns to navigate. There are several great areas to view cryptobiotic soils. There is also a junction with the trail from (or to) Kachina Bridge. The trip across the mesa is an easy hike.
Sipapu Bridge
From the Sipapu Bridge parking area the trail drops dramatically down two sets of steel stairs and along the cliff face. Eventually you come to a ten foot wooden ladder and then you can walk out along the ledge to a flat sandstone area that looks down over the Sipapu Bridge. It's a very good view of the bridge, maybe the best, because as you move closer to the bridge you lose some perspective.
From there we continued on down the trail, down several more ladders and areas where they have placed guardrails to help you up and down. Once you reach the canyon bottom you are directly under the bridge and the span of sandstone cuts the sky as you look up. You feel dwarfed by the size.
White Canyon
From there we moved downstream along White Canyon to the west and southwest. The canyon bottom is sandy and strewn with boulders and rocks of various sizes. About three weeks prior to our visit there had been a large storm in the area that dropped over 2.5 inches of water and caused a great deal of flash flooding. We could see the results, where water had knocked down trees and deposited debris on benches above our heads. It was frightening, in places, to realize that we were standing about ten feet below the level of the water. Of course the aftermath of the flood left debris and tumbled plants all along our path, so it made it difficult, at times, for us to walk along at any steady pace. Often we had to pick our way through the branches of downed trees, around stagnant pools, and across mud flats still wet from the torrents.
Horse Collar Ruin
As we moved along we spotted the Horse Collar Ruin above our heads along the north wall of the canyon. Two other hikers were working their way down from the ancient dwelling, but we decided to continue on, knowing that we'd see other similar structures when we visited Hovenweep the next day.
Kachina Bridge
We worked our way along the bottom of the canyon until we came to Kachina Bridge. There we ran into a group of three young people from Poland, and other folks who had come down the Kachina Bridge Trail from the loop road above. And this is where we got confused. White Canyon, once it passes under the bridge, continues on to the west. It seemed that that was the way we needed to go. But I remembered reading that there was a point where it seemed that you should continue one way, but really needed to go another. So we followed the steps of those who had come down from the Kachina Bridge parking area and proceeded up Armstrong Canyon, more to the southeast. Where the trail to the top split off we continued on a short ways until we came to a dead end, the Knickpoint pour-off. There was a large pool of water underneath a dry waterfall. There was no way to proceed along that course, but we could see a shelf of sandstone above us, and suspected that maybe that was the way around. However, we were not sure.
We retraced our steps to the trail up to the Kachina Bridge parking area. There was a registration box there, and we hoped that perhaps there were directions. But there was nothing (although that is where we found out that the threesome that we had encountered under the bridge was from Poland). While we were standing there reviewing the map and trying to pick our route, another middle-aged couple came up from the direction we had come. They had day packs and looked to be hikers. I asked if they knew the route and they pointed up the trail toward the parking area, and told us that the trail we wanted passed along the ledge above the waterfall, as we had suspected.
We followed them up a ways, to the junction of the two trails, and, indeed, the trail that we wanted was marked there. I think the Park Service could easily have placed some sort of sign down near the bridge that would direct hikers coming from Sipapu Bridge. I wonder how many get lost along the White Canyon and have to backtrack.
Knickpoint Pour-off
We continued on, passing near the top of the Knickpoint pour-off, and on up the canyon. The walking was somewhat easier, since Armstrong Canyon was smaller than White Canyon, and we were now walking upstream. But it was still difficult to locate the trail in several places, and we had to do some short backtracking to get past downed trees and pools of water. Besides, by this time, we were beginning to get a bit tired. Walking along this type of sandy, gravelly, unmaintained trail is much more tiring than walking along a packed maintained trail. Having to pick out a path is fun for a while, but gets more difficult on a longer hike.
But we kept plugging along, glad that the weather was no warmer than it was. We eventually came to a spot where the trail climbed up to a sandstone ledge, and then worked its way along the face of the cliff. We were out of the canyon bottom and were able to move along more quickly.
Owachomo Bridge
And then there it was, Owachomo Bridge, and after a short but steep climb, we made it to our Trooper and the parking area.
Along the hike we spotted a woodpecker and a blue jay of some sort, small chipmunks, tiny lizards, and that was about it, besides the ubiquitous ravens.
We drove around the loop, back to the Visitor Center, where we used the rest rooms, then we drove to the very nice picnic area that they have set up between the Sipapu Bridge Overlook and the Sipapu Bridge parking area. We ate a late lunch, then visited each of the overlooks to see what our hike looked like from above. We skipped the walk out to the Horse Collar Ruin Overlook though. We left the Monument at about 4:45 p.m.
