When we made our itinerary, we drew an approximate route and decided which things along the route we couldn’t miss — first and foremost the Grand Canyon, of course. We also each contributed a few things that we definitely wanted to see. Today we saw two of those.
We chose Page for this overnight because of the first: The Glen Canyon Dam. Folks, they just filled a canyon with water. And it worked! On each side of the dam is the exact same canyon, which really paints the picture of what’s beneath the surface of the water. But the real marvel here is the massive hydroelectric generators inside. As vertigo-inducing as the natural geological formations are out here, the fact that it’s human-made makes the dam somehow even more impossible in scale. We stood in the middle of the well-used bridge spanning the canyon and endured the several inches of resonant bounce that it makes under load for this photo:
The second of the must-sees: Buckskin Gulch. This is a fair bit north at the bottom of Utah. The trailhead is at the end of 8 miles of washboard textured, boulder-studded, dusty-ass road. It was utterly worth it.
This was a bit of a challenging hike for a couple of reasons. The first mile follows a dry, dusty wash (seasonal creekbed) and it was very windy that day. We got sandblasted.
For a human, the other challenges aren’t so bad. They require a little bit of parkour is all — drops in the floor of the slot canyon. But for a dog? Different story. There’s a 6 foot drop with a nice wide ladder that Georgia couldn’t climb, so we took the bypass trail up and around in the baking sun. The photos on the other side were well worth the scramble. Rosie was right to put this on the must-see list.
There was another drop later that was again dog-unfriendly, but this time no way around. We were deep in the canyon at this point, so Rosie forged ahead a good quarter mile to get more photos while I stayed behind with the dog. Who looked and listened after her the whole time.
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