Memorial Day-Little Bluejohn/Goblin Valley/Ding Dang

[moabfool]

Memorial Day weekend was great. I went down to The Swell Thursday night to get a campsite. I should have camped up by Temple Mountain, but I got a pretty good spot between Goblin Valley and Little Wild Horse. The only downside of the trip was the wind and blowing dust.

On Friday I hiked the Little Wild Horse/Bell loop. It was nice to have Behind The Reef Road and Bell Canyon all to myself (I was solo on Friday). Hiking the loop was good, but LWH is not that great of a canyon when compared with some of the other adventures in the state. Worth doing? Yes. Worth doing twice? YMMV.

I was supposed to take my friend Mike down with me on Thursday to do Zero G on Friday and Not Mindbender on Saturday. He didn't come because he had to be back north on Saturday night and his ride backed out of the trip. That's why I was making all the beta requests for Zero G and The Squeeze. Sadly, I didn't get to do either. Someday though.

The rest of my group arrived Friday night. Saturday we drove over to hike/slide down ropes in Little Blue John. That's a great canyon. It's kinda tight, really jinky, and very slotty with lots of great downclimbing. I did the Main Fork of Bluejohn a couple years ago, and I liked Little Bluejohn better. I have yet to see the Ralston spot, but someday I will.

We were going to take an hour and explore the up Main Fork as far as we could, but we got maybe 200 yards up the Main Fork and ran across a young rattle snake about 18" long. We figured that was a sign that it was time to get out of the canyon, so we took pictures of the snake and turned around.

We had a little confusion finding the West Fork/determining whether we were in the West Fork (we really didn't try that hard). We tried going up what I thought was the West fork, but we ran into a massive rock fall that I didn't remember from my previous trip to Bluejohn. Since some people were getting fatigued (there were 11 of us) I decided to turn around and go out the Main Exit rather than face unknown/uncharted obstacles.

To post comments about the rock fall, please go to this thread: http://uutah.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2632

On Sunday we went to Goblin Valley. We were there for all of five minutes before somebody wanted to play hide and seek. Somebody else suggested that we play 'sardines.' If you're unfamiliar with sardines it's a pretty easy game and kids (old and young) love it. Instead of everybody going out to hide while the person who is "it" goes and looks, the person who is "it" goes and hides and everybody looks for them. The other difference is that when one of the lookers finds the person who is "it" they must then hide with them. And so it goes until everybody (but one) is hiding in this spot. The first person to find the hider is then "it" and goes out to find their own place to hide. Goblin Valley has to be the best place to play sardines in the history of ever.

It hardly stopped blowing all day on Saturday and Sunday. We got sandblasted in the approach/exit of Bluejohn, and the dust made fixing dinner hard on Sunday, but the cooler temperatures were welcome. The wind was so strong that the charcoal blew off the dutch ovens. Okay, not completely off, but it was blowing around on the lids. We even had to drop one of the tents on Sunday during the day so it wouldn't blow away. The other one stayed up, no worries. All I can say is Springbar tents rule. I use the crap out of that tent. My family has had that Springbar for 22 years and it's still going strong. Made in Utah by Kirkham's (AAA Tent and Awning).

We hiked Ding and Dang Canyons on Monday. Talk about an awesome, slabby, scrambly, downclimby good time. There was no water in either canyon, and the newbies all did very well on the scrambling and downclimbing with minimal assistance. We didn't need a handline for anything, but we did find a single bolt anchor in Dang with a piece of accessory cord and a non-locking biner on it. I don't know what surprises me more, that somebody actually handlined or rappelled on a non-locking biner, or that somebody felt the need to place a bolt. Yah, it was a hard spot, but not that hard. We packed out the biner and accessory cord, and wished there had been a way to take the bolt.

It would be hard to compare Little Blue John and Ding/Dang. Both are great adventures, but the Ding/Dang loop is definitely better than LWH/Bell and a lot less crowded.

Here are a few pictures. More can be found at http://photos.yahoo.com/moabfool Just scroll down 'till you find the album "2006/05_Memorial Day"

[Sombeech]

That's a fun little combo.

[stefan]

Nice, thanks for sharin'

Seems like everyone's finding lots of rattlers in the canyons these days!! i guess it's that time o' year again. it's always nice when you can stem over them.

[rockgremlin]

Wow! I've never seen Dang that dry! I'm glad you took that sling out of Dang -- that thing is useless!

Thanks for sharing!