My wife’s family reunion was at Joe’s Valley this year so I hauled the camp trailer there and did some kayaking, mountain biking, and hiking. We arrived on Thursday morning, and that afternoon I took my new kayak out on the reservoir for a test drive. I bought it to run the San Rafael River (probably as a multi-day trip) the next time it flows enough to be navigable, but I wanted to get a feel for how it handled on flat water. I paddled along the shore from our camp near Little’s Creek to the mouth of Lowry Water. I was paddling against a decent breeze and it was really easy to make headway still. On the way back I let the breeze carry me out into more open water before paddling back to shore. I probably should have tried it with 50 pounds of gear onboard but I didn’t think that far ahead.
Launching the kayak near camp
On the reservoir
Heron
Geese
Joe’s Valley Reservoir
Mouth of Lowry Water
On Friday morning I was up early to ride the Little’s Creek mountain bike loop. My friend Wade helped design and build the trail, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have known it existed. I rode straight from camp to a connector trail off UT-29 and rode the loop clockwise. It was a really pleasant and easy ride with no real obstacles or steep climbs. The trail is wide and smooth, alternating between sagebrush flats and ponderosa pine-covered hillsides. It took me two hours to ride the 8-mile loop, and that included stopping for a lot of photos.
Hitting the singletrack
Wide trail
Lower crossing of Little’s Creek
Upper crossing of Little’s Creek
Not a camera
CCC terrace
View of the reservoir
Descent toward Reeder
Trailhead
Camp
I got another early start on Saturday, hiking along an old trail that goes up Little’s Creek. The trail is clear in this very cool aerial image from 1940 that shows Joe’s Valley before the reservoir. It’s not very visible in today’s modern imagery, and even on the ground there were only a couple of places where I could see any remnants of the trail. I hiked right from camp again, following as closely as I could a track I’d created in my GPS that follows the trail. It really surprised me that something so clear in 1940 would be almost unnoticeable 85 years later. I saw very few signs of human use along the way: a bullet hole in a boulder next to the trail and part of a broken bottle. I also found a shed elk antler, the second one this summer. I crossed a small meadow and then lost the trail on the other side. Where the GPS track said to go was too overgrown and I couldn’t see any other easy way through the trees.
Old road
Sunlight hitting Wagon Road Ridge
CCC terrace
View over the reservoir
Sun coming up over Trail Mountain
Old trail remnant
No trail here
Maybe part of the old trail
Trail past a boulder
Bullet hole in a boulder
Trail crossing a steep slope
Broken purple glass bottle
Shed elk antler
Small meadow
I bushwhacked my way down to the creek to see if there was any sort of trail along it, and there wasn’t, so I started back toward camp. Instead of following the trail back I took a more direct route which descended a steep ridge, followed the fenceline of a grazing exclosure that’s also visible in the 1940 image, and then paralleled Little’s Creek the rest of the way to camp. It had only been a five-mile hike but it was pretty rugged and took me 3.5 hours. We went home Sunday morning. I had hoped to ride more mountain bike trails early that morning but I was still saddlesore from Friday’s ride. My legs are in great shape but my butt not so much!
Little’s Creek
The Switchbacks across Little’s Creek
Joe’s Valley Reservoir
Camp below
Following the exclosure fenceline
Little’s Creek
Photo Gallery: Weekend at Joe’s