4/12/2017 Day 7 Kane Creek Canyon/ Dead Horse Point

Kane Creek Canyon is incredibly beautiful, Bryan and I actually stayed on that side last year and had a good time, but we had dry camped for the week. The trail although didn’t appear very challenging at first glance.

I’d watched a few YouTube videos, that talked about it being an easy day trail crossing Kane Creek some 50 times. We had lunch in the canyon about 5 miles from our exit point. Right after lunch we swooped a group from California, as they were just starting up after their lunch.

Kane Creek Canyon is a nice departure from serious rock crawling right up until Hamburger Hill, then things got a little more serious, but like the great team we had formed into we plugged along and got through, trying to not hold up the 2 other groups pushing to get through behind us.

We beat them to the outlet by enough time to get aired up and rolled back by the camp before continuing our day’s journey out to a bucket list item for Brandon – Dead Horse Point. Where the Colorado River has a horse shoe bend in it favored by many photographers, including some in our group. Steve decided to not chase us the 65 miles out as his full hydraulic steering wasn’t designed for that.

It was a long ride up to the park and we must have jumped up to some 7000 ft in elevation, but what a beautiful view. Many pictures were taken, however, the picture that Mandi most wanted was a clear shot of the bend itself. Unbeknownst to us the access we could see from the top was Potash Road, the highway that goes by Poison Spyder Mesa, then jumping off on Rd 142 that goes up to Canyon Lands or visa versa.

The group headed back to camp, while Mandi & I decided on a night to ourselves. We took our time coming off the hill we stopped for some photo ops on our way back to town. We then decided to have dinner at the Branding Iron a stone’s throw from camp. Now the food here was great but similar to the Atomic Grill at the other side of town, service was somewhat slow, friendly but slow. Maybe we just operate at a faster pace than Moab folks?

Once we finished dinner, I got a hair brained (unusual for a bald guy) idea of running back over to the Kane Creek Campground to maybe get Mandi some shots of a moonrise I was intrigued with last year. So we ran around that mountain and awaited the moon’s rise over the hill between us and our camp. This was a great idea, but we weren’t really set up well for it, no tripod, to allow for long shutter openings etc. But we tried, returning to camp chilled around 11:00 pm, the rest had already called it a night. Next up Arches National Park/Vendor Day!