Crawford Wash

I was able to convince Jacqueline and David to take a break from their busy lives to go explore some backcountry with me. I picked Crawford Wash on the East side of Zion, because once again, I have never been there before which is all the reason that I need. This will sound like a broken record, but the colors were very nice once again. We headed into and then out of Clear Creek into Crawford Wash. Hiking up drainages on the east side is sort of a two-headed monster. There are two sides to them, so we started heading up. It was not too long before the canyon slotted out. Luckily, the canyon
did not prove to be impossible as there was a way around it on the right. It was steep enough that I did not want to go back down it any time soon. Eventually we hit the saddle where we could see the rest of our hike and the views behind us. From here we all took different directions. David went high to see the views from the slickrock above. Jacqueline went middle and hiked on the slickrock, while I descended straight into the canyon below. We all met up at a place that I believed may be a bit of a problem and had a snack. Once we got going again, the drop turned out to be too much of a risk. We were only about ten feet above the canyon floor, but we did not want to take any unneccessary risks. Luckily, David checked out the saddle near where we stopped and he said that it would go. It did and we ended up in another canyon that looked like an option to go out from. We talked about that, but continued our way down toward the end of Crawford Wash. We came to a big drop-off into a nice big pool. Once again, as proved to be the truth on this day, where there is a will, there is a way and we were able to scramble around to the right. Now, we were back in our original canyon and it was amazingly flat and sandy from here all the way to an overlook of Parunaweap, which had to be our ending point on this day. It was a beautiful spot to have lunch and it was interesting to see that this would be one reasonable rappel to enter into Parunaweap if it did not happen to be off limits since it was a research area. There also happened to be the deepest pothole ever, which if I was canyoneering and I saw that, it would scare me to death. There was no way out of that thing unless you really had some good equipment. We continued back up the flat, sandy wash until we came to our junction with the pool. We decided to head up the other section of canyon that we missed. It turned out to be a good idea. It narrowed quite a bit for some time which was probably our best narrows of the day. We were able to scramble up the section that we did not want to go down, but then just dropped back into the same canyon that we used to access the rest of Crawford Wash previously. We decided to try a different line back. We saw quite a few bighorn sheep tracks that were very recent on our first scramble down from this point, so we were on high alert. Jacqueline was able to pick them out on the rocks above us. They did not stay long and I am always amazed to see their ability to just run on things that would make me cringe. Well, we headed up our new canyon and it proved to be a worthwhile venture. There were excellent views to be had as we could see much of Zion's east side stretch out before us. There was one issue that came up as a result of our choice, though, as even though we had a map, we did not follow it. I may have got a little ahead of myself not really making the right choice when we had an easy way to see what that choice should have been. We went too far west and ended up coming to some harder slickrock scrambling than I wanted to encounter. With the help of David's confident, "oh yeah, it will go", we scrambled down some steep stuff until we were able to hit Clear Creek once again. All three of us were happy that the last section was over, as it is never a good idea to assume anything in Zion when it comes to routes. We had a great day in the park, though, as all of us were glad we chose this area to explore.