I was a little disappointed when we had to push this trip back one day due to a chance of rain because it the most promising thing we’d planned for the three days Chris and I had to hike together before he shipped back to Germany. My main goal was to search an area in the Last Chance Desert for a rock art panel that I’d seen a couple of photos of but I had very little information about its location. I believed I knew which geological rock formation the pictographs were painted on, and I’d recently seen a hint online that greatly narrowed down the possible locations. We left Price a little after 7:00 AM and headed toward the far southwestern San Rafael Swell. It’s debatable whether this area is even part of the Swell since the uplift isn’t as well-defined here as it is in other places. We started hiking toward a wash and soon started seeing signs that led us to believe we might be on the right track.
Low pass leading to the next drainage over
Last Chance Desert with Thousand Lake Mountain and Hens Hole Peak above
Circle of small basalt boulders
Potsherd
Nails driven into a boulder
The distant Henry Mountains
The canyon walls got deeper for a while, and then as we climbed we entered and explored several shallower tributaries at the head of the canyon. We looked in all the most likely spots for any sort of alcove or overhang but completely struck out. Instead of following the canyon back down we climbed out to the rim where it was less likely but still possible there might be some overhangs in the rock formations, but we still didn’t find the rock art. I think the hint I’d seen was a red herring and I was completely in the wrong place. And since then I’ve gotten a couple of other clues that suggest a different place but it’s still too large an area to just search randomly without more specific info.
Heading up the wash
Deep walls
Volcanic dike
Mud curtain
Still climbing up the wash
Dryfall
Small upper canyon
Chris and some basalt rocks
Dark basalt rocks on the Curtis Formation sandstone
On the return trip, as I was descending a steep and rocky slope, I somehow fell and took quite a tumble. I don’t even know how it happened–I just remember my face falling quickly toward the ground and then ending up on my back with my feet facing uphill. My backpack was wedged between some large rocks and I couldn’t even sit up so Chris had to help pull me to a sitting position. He had seen part of the fall and said my feet were flying through the air, so I must have tumbled head over feet at least once. My right knee, wrist, and shoulder hurt and I was certain this trip was over. I was even worried about making it back to the truck easily. My adrenaline was pumping, though, and I decided we should just hurry back before it wore off and the pain got worse. We kept heading toward the truck for about 10 minutes and then I found a comfortable spot to sit in the shade and take stock of the damage. The only visible injury was a gouge on my knee, which I patched up with adhesive bandages and then duct tape when those wouldn’t stay put. My backpack broke part of the fall but, perhaps ironically, the only thing inside that was damaged was the first aid kit. We continued another 1.5 miles back to the truck and I made it fine with just some pain, mostly in that knee but also a bit in the ankle. I felt like I might still be able to continue with the trip and so we did just that, and I ended up hiking another six miles for the day. It wasn’t until more than a week later when I went for another hike that I realized the damage extended below the surface into my knee joint. Until that point I had been hiking more and working out and losing quite a bit of weight, but this injury set me back for a while and I didn’t fully recover for about 2.5 months.
Gouge in my knee
After returning to the truck and eating some lunch we took the short drive to our next destination, not to look for rock art this time but to see some old mining ruins. A friend had told me in 2018 about a mine and mining camp in this area and more recently I’d seen a video from somebody who visited. I was surprised that Last Chance Creek was completely dry. We hiked up the creek bed and an old road to the mining camp, where an outhouse is all that remains standing of several buildings. Continuing up the creek and then up a steep and rugged road in a side canyon, we reached the mine area. There was a hoist made from the front half of an old car, an ore bucket, hopper, and chute, but no obvious mine shaft or adit. Either it was a surface mine or the shaft has been filled in. I can’t figure out what was being mined here but the Summerville Formation is known for its gypsum deposits and not much else.
Last Chance Creek
Outhouse
Collapsed structure
Cabin foundation
Collapsed cabin
Old truck
Truck door
Last Chance Creek
Last Chance Creek
Rugged road up a side canyon
Chute
Near-vertical and horizontal layers
Metal chutes
Front of a car turned into a hoist
Top of the cable
Cairn and hoodoos
We returned down the creek to the truck and cruised over to the Mussentuchit Wash area where I’d noticed some hoodoos in the satellite imagery and wanted to see them in person. We parked at a bone-dry stock reservoir and hiked into the head of the wash that feeds the reservoir. It’s difficult to determine the scale of the hoodoos just from aerial imagery so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but they turned out to be a little smaller than I envisioned. The area was desolate and scenic–just my kind of place–and I felt it was worth the nearly three-mile hike.
Volcanic dike
Dry reservoir and Twin Peaks
Plant growing in the dry lakebed
Cottonwood tree and tamarisk
Across the flat expanse
Little round formations in the Curtis
Nearing the head of the wash
Slanted rock
Curtis Formation layers
Hoodoo
Chris and a hoodoo
Cubed boulder
Hoodoo
Hoodoo
Hoodoo
View back toward the parked truck
That hike was the last plan we had for the day but on the drive home Chris noticed if we took a slight detour we could find a geocache that had been placed over a year earlier with zero finds. On the way there I was surprised to find that the old bridge over Muddy Creek at Lone Tree Crossing has been replaced (I didn’t take a photo but wish I would have). We couldn’t find the geocache so we left a replacement and then continued on our way home, seeing some wild horses before getting back to I-70. It had been disappointing not finding the rock art but the rest of the trip made up for it.
Basalt boulder on the Entrada sandstone near South Salt Wash
Wild horses
Wild foal
Photo Gallery: Willkommen Zurück Part 2: Last Chance & Mussentuchit