Trip Report: Car camp & hike a slot near Goblin Valley & a mesa near Caineville
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Car camp & hike a slot near Goblin Valley & a mesa near Caineville By Katherine Thom |
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| HIKE | 05/23/2025 | MOD |
| Little Wild Horse Slot Canyon and North Caineville Mesa (South Route) camp and hike Participants: Holly Pearson, John Gould, Bob Briggs, and Katherine Thom (organizer) We got a head start on the busy holiday weekend by having one of us head down a day early to secure a nice-sized and shady-ish campsite close to Goblin Valley State Park. The Park is surrounded by free dispersed camping with bathrooms available on either side of Wild Horse Road. After meeting up in Green River, we all made our way to our site and set up tents and our respective meal prep stations. The skies were clear and we were excited for the chance to view some stars and have a nice quiet evening. The nearby camp spots were packed with folks with a different idea of "quiet hours" but it was nice to be so close to the park for a place to wash up and check for messages. Early Saturday we piled into one vehicle and made our way to the Little Wild Horse trailhead. We opted to do Bell Canyon to the left and to work our way clockwise coming back down Little Wild Horse in order to do the cooler canyon in the late morning. We had Bell Canyon to ourselves and it was extremely beautiful. We took a nice relaxed pace and snapped lots of photos of the rocks and blooming desert flowers. We saw lots of lizards, birds, insects, and one nonchalant cottontail rabbit. Once we met up with Little Wild Horse we started to see many more people coming the other way. Thankfully we did not see any OHVs on the brief section that allows motorized travel. Little Wild Horse started out very similarly to Bell but then became very narrow. Unfortunately that was also when we started to encounter the most people. The children entertained us by pretending to hold up heavy boulders and everyone seemed to be in awe of how narrow the canyon could get. We were ready to put up our feet by the time we made it back out to the wide wash back near the trailhead, but the temperatures were still fairly comfortable. Back at camp just a few minutes away, we retreated to the shade and enjoyed conversation, naps and cold drinks. The next day, Bob stayed to explore Goblin Valley on his mountain bike while John, Holly and Katherine headed down towards Hanksville for a climb up North Caineville Mesa. Since there was no official nor obvious trailhead (but one historic cement truck), we used our phones to make sure we were parked on public land and followed Road Trip Ryan's (popular Utah outdoor blogger) GPS track up the south route. We followed the spines of the gray/blue Mancos shale badlands to make our way to the loose rocks and boulders of the Ferron sandstone. It was difficult steep hiking to say the least but cairns and a worn path were fairly easily spotted. We curved around to the east and enjoyed some easy scrambling before hitting the "cap" of the mesa, made of Mesa Verde sandstone, standing in tall columns above. We spotted a cairn near a large gap with a sizeable drop below and determined that that was not the correct route. To our right we found the small hole described in Ryan's blog and an arrow etched into the rock pointing right at the hole. We took off our packs and squeezed through it one at a time. It was very tight but thankfully very short and before we knew it we were on top of the mesa. We took photos, checked out the animal bones, and had a snack. Dark clouds were hanging over the town of Boulder in the distance and headed our way, so we didn't stay too long. We used every ropeless downclimb method in our arsenal to get down and were relieved to be back on the grippy badland spines. We said our goodbyes back at our vehicles and finished packing up camp back in Goblin Valley. The wind and sand wreaked havoc on our belongings, but it was still time well spent with a great group of hardy desert adventurers. |
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