Buckskin Gulch, UT

First let me tell you about “The Wave”. The Wave is world famous and people come from all over the world to hike it. The Wave is so fragile that the BLM only allows 20 people a day to hike into Coyote Buttes (the general area) and the Wave (a specific feature in the area). 10 people are drawn from an internet lottery held 4 months in advance of the permit date, and 10 people are drawn the day before the permit date from the 80+ that show up at the BLM Paria office. This is our second day applying. The odds are not good, but we applied with hope in our hearts... Not today. ☹☹ The BLM is so strict that if 9 have been drawn and a permit for two is drawn next, only one can go. 10 people – absolute limit. We're going to stick around for a couple of days to try and win the lottery.

Second, a “Gulch” is a canyon, and it generally tends to refer to the more steep sided river carved canyons.  Hackberry was a canyon, but almost a gulch. Who knows. Buckskin Gulch is the longest, tightest, and deepest slot canyon in the world. It runs from the head of the canyon on House Rocks road to the Paria River. A slot canyon is one so narrow and so deep that you sometimes have to remove your pack and turn sideways to slip through. Water roars through these canyons during times of rain and can turn them into an instant death trap. Often storms many miles away will send a wall of water rushing through the canyon.

 This is a slot canyon.

It is hard to describe what it is like to be in one of these canyons. They are amazingly beautiful, fun to hike, and just a little scary. Fortunately for us, no recent rain, and none predicted, so the fear of flash floods was pretty much non-existent. The fun and beauty...Lots of it. I'm not going to tell you how many pictures we took, but we're into the many hundreds (just on this hike). I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
The entry into Buckskin Gulch is from the Wire Pass trailhead. It starts with a wander down a typical canyon wash. We are fortunate to be here at this time of year when the temperatures are still cool and the desert flowers are blooming.

The canyons were alive with Indian Paintbrush, dotting the sage hillsides with bright red splashes.











About a mile down the Wire Pass Trail the walls start to close in on the canyon, then suddenly around a corner the canyon drops into a narrrow opening and disappears. For the next 12 miles, until you get all the way to the Paria River, there is no escape from this narrow canyon but to turn around and hike back the way you came in. The walls are sheer rock 3 to 15 feet apart and, after the first quarter mile, 200 to 400 feet high. It's a very spooky, yet exhilarating place.

The Wire Pass Trail actually connects with the 15 mile Buckskin Gulch at it's 4 mile point, and as I said, from this point on you are in it.  This junction is one of the few places where the canyon widens enough to get a clear view of the sky.

The canyon walls vary in color from a deep maroon to red, orange, and at times yellow, constantly changing with the sun. We had a beautiful blue sky day and the sunlight played on the walls throughout the middle of the day. We wondered what it would be like to hike the canyon in a full moon. Creepy I'm sure.






From this point, until we turned back about 4 miles down canyon we never saw more than a few feet of the sky high above our heads.

Our intrepid and fun loving guides Whazoo (Dave) and Lynn. Whazoo and Lynn travel around the southwest searching out extreme and unusual adventures...They know all the good places and we are very fortunate that they have chosen to share some of them with us.


Dave regularly posts pictures and text about his adventures on an internet forum. Go to WWW.RV.NET, select the truck camper section and do a search for “Whazoo”. You will be amazed. His trip reports are informative and funny.

You can see in these shots that a little sunlight is filtering down, but the walls are very close here.
They are usually very smooth and sculptured in sinuous curves.
Millions of years of sand laden water can do a lot of work. The floor of the canyon is relatively flat which makes me wonder just how deep the sand under our feet is.

This debris pile, the bottom of which is lodged 30 feet above our heads, will give you some idea of what a flash flood in a slot canyon might be like.

We kept playing Peek-A-Boo with each other, and bouncing echos around the corners. Somehow we timed it very well and only ran into about 8 or 10 other hikers in the 4 or so hours we were in the gulch.

Sunlight on Stone

The picture at left is in the Wire Pass Trail just after entering the slot. As you can see the walls are somewhat lower here prior to the junction with Buckskin Gulch.

Want to guess how that stick got up there?

Our heartfelt thanks to Dave and Lynn. This is the second year they have seen fit to shephard us around the southwest in search of amazing adventures. They're the best.



Special thanks to Cheryl whose photographic skills are what makes these reports so good. Cameras: Canon S3-IS & Canon Rebel XSI







Next: Dave takes us to the Colorado River...The hard way: Cathedral Wash.