Sunday, 10th of June 2012 at 06:07:43 AM

Y.S.N.P. day 8: the Golden Cathedral hike

Today I wanted to see the Golden Cathedral in the Neon Canyon of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. A famous spot for fotografers and Canyon lovers. The trailhead of this hike is on the Egypt branch road at mile 10 of the Hole  in the Rock gravel road. On that road 16 further miles had to be driven to reach the trailhead. Whereas the Hole in the Road access road is quite good to drive, the Egypt road has many rocks and sand. Some points you must be very carefull not to damage the car. I also once touched rock with my Jeep despite the High clearance. All this means the drive time to the trailhead is long. Therefore I had to start early at 5.20 am and arrived at 7 am at the trailhead. The hike is very strenous. Althoug it’s only 13km (9 mile) roundtrip, you must first climb donwn into the canyon, cross the Escalante river and there are no marked trails, so you need good route finding skills or GPS. I had a GPS and the recorded track of this hike (Thanks Matthias R.) otherwise I would have been lost. I arrived 9.20 am at the Golden cathedral and stayed 2h there.

Golden Cathedral, Neon Canyon, Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument
No one was there. On the return a large part of the climbing out of the canyon was on a sand dune, where hiking is very tiring and exhausting. I arrived 2.30 pm at the trailhead and felt like half-dead. After recovering and drinking ice-cold coke I was still tired but decided to do further 2 small hikes to Grand Staircase Escalante’s small slot canyons called Peek-a-boo and Spooky. I had some trouble finding them (presumably due to my exhaustion. Again here it was necessary to climb up from the Canyon Ground to the Trailhead and car park, I did this in Slow motion. Arrived 6 pm at the car and went back to Esclante for dinner .

 

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