Needles Hike?

Day 42    May 17, 2015

Drive to Needles

One last hike before we head home.  Today we drove to the “Needles” section of Canyonland.  This took about an hour and a half.  This is the lower district of Canyonland NP, thus it has to be accessed from another location.  Within this district are the “needles” and the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers.  Since we have seen “needles” in Bryce and we had seen pictures of the confluence, showing the colors of each river coming together, we decided to go to the confluence.  After some research we found out that this would be a nice hike along the tops of canyons to the overlook and it would be only 10 miles. 

Start of trail

I don’t know if I have mentioned but this trip has shown us that the National Parks are notoriously bad at distances.  We stopped by the visitor’s center to check out what we had learned before.  They told us there was a pretty good decent and climb out in our first quarter mile but after that it would be fairly easy.  That sounded good to us.  Well, we should have looked further on this trail.  Yes, the first quarter mile was tough climbing down then back up.  In fact, it took us nearly 45 minutes to do this.  If this were the only climbing then we would have been okay but, we found that it continued off and on for over 4 miles.  Some so bad that we had to crawl or scoot down and up 10-15’ rocks.  

Trail?

 

Slight climb (HA)

This nearly scared us to death several times.  Everything was ROCK and I don’t mean rocks with edges but with no features to grasp, just slip on.  At 4 miles we came to a slickrock that had a decent of 8’ to the ground (another rock) with no means of handholds or steps.  If we go down this rock we are committed but how will we return?  At this point we decided to turn around and keep our health.  Now all we have to do is get back without killing ourselves.  This is much easier said than done.  By being extremely careful and helping each other we were able to make it back without incident.  Neither of us had ever started a hike and not completed it before.   At this point, we realized that it is good that we are headed home tomorrow.  The only real regret that I have over this is that I did not get to make the picture of the confluence.  It would have been interesting to have seen the two colors together.

Trail?  Where?