Devil's Gulch

Our plans to go for a hike on Sunday were dampened by the rain that drizzled off and on throughout the day, but they didn’t get washed out completely. Instead of leaving for a hike right after breakfast, we did some stuff around the house, then went grocery shopping, and then it was time for lunch and after lunch a nap…

When Cailan woke up, the rain had temporarily abated, so we headed out to Devil’s Canyon, part of the Black Ridge Wilderness Area about 15 minutes west of town. Not surprisingly, there weren’t many people at the trailhead. We started up the wide graveled path with Cailan on my back just as it started sprinkling again, and soon it was raining steadily on us but we persevered. We turned off the wide path onto a narrow dirt trail that was right at the rim of Devil’s Canyon, though the canyon here was maybe only 20 feet deep and 30 feet across, with a dry creek bed at the bottom. After a while, the trail slanted down into the canyon.

We stopped for a snack and to put on our raincoats, while the occasional grumble of thunder echoed around the mesa. Cailan was surprisingly happy, even though he was chilly and damp, and was especially excited about chomping his strawberry cereal bar. We kept on hiking, following the dry creek bed which was now accumulating the occasional puddle; Utah did his best to drink from every puddle. The canyon walls were growing higher, sloping near the creek bed then rising steeply with reddish-orange rock faces. At a fork in the trail, we took the right turn up a steep hill and followed the trail along a bench, well above the creek bed but below the rocky canyon walls.



Cailan was on the lookout for the desert bighorn sheep that live in this canyon, but we never saw them. We did see a couple toads, and two lizards, and a big bird (turkey vulture?) perched on a rock high above us. We saw some rocky towers jutting out from the canyon walls. I called the first one I saw a finger rock, and Cailan immediately wanted to know where the thumb rock was. Soon we found another tower to call the thumb rock, and when we got near the base of that, we decided it was a good spot to turn around.




On the way back to the car, we were walking in the creek bed again and I slipped in some mud and came crashing to my hands and knees. I still had Cailan on my back, and I worked very hard to not fall all the way over on to him. He was unharmed, but we both got muddy and had to have a leg bath when we got home.