Journeys: Lower Muley Twist Canyon - Capitol Reef National Park, Utah - Backpacking

Monday, June 18, 2007

Lower Muley Twist Canyon - Capitol Reef National Park, Utah - Backpacking

Jake, Rob, and I headed down to Capitol Reef National Park last weekend to do an overnight backpacking trip. After spending obscene amounts of money at REI over the past few months we were anxious to try out our new gear. It's a bit early to backpack some of the peaks around Salt Lake so we decided to do a nice desert hike in south-central Utah.

Capitol Reef is probably my favorite national park in Utah because it's not nearly as crowded with people as the other parks. Canyonlands is my favorite for scenery, but nothing beats Capitol Reef for peace and quiet. We only saw two day hikers on the entire route - it felt like we had the whole canyon to ourselves.

We hiked Lower Muley Twist Canyon in the extreme southern portion of the park. The trail was basically a dried riverbed at the bottom of a canyon. It was absolutely beautiful and probably a horrible place to be in a flash flood. We found a nice little spot to camp about 8 miles into the canyon and hiked out the next day. Some pics...

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess