The White Rim Road is a 105+ mile long 4x4 road in Canyonlands National Park. It follows the edge of the "white rim", sort of a canyon within a canyon, basically follwing the Colorado and Green rivers. It's easy to become jaded with the scenery along this road, with million dollar views pretty much the whole way. Pick any spot along the way and look around- what would be a spectacular vista worthy of many pictures in any other situation gets a simple "ho-hum." In fact, it becomes difficult to decide when to take pictures because you loose all sense of perspective when the whole damn road is that amazing.
Speaking of perspective, it's often hard to actually grasp what you are looking at, especially the distance views of the maze of canyons. Everything becomes two dimensional... our eyes simply aren't wide enough to percieve the incredible depth and scope. It's kind of like the Grand Canyon, where the eyeballs just can't do the job alone... we see the vastness and beauty, but we don't comprehend it. In other words, we have to use our brain as well, to 'fill in the blanks' that our eyes cannot do alone. As usual, the pictures to great injustice to the actual views.
It was me and my dad in the Tacoma, Michael in his '01 Tacoma, and Jose with his wife in the Lexus LX450. We left camp about 7:20am, aired down, and with much anticipation we started our descent to the White Rim Road on the Shafer switchbacks. This section is fairly wide and graded, yet quite steep in places.
The road to the Lathrop Canyon spur was relatively simple.
Gooseneck Overlook:
Mussleman Arch (yes, muscle man):
Random spot along the road:
Lathrop Canyon is a 4 mile sidespur to the edge of the Colorado River. Real 4-low wheeling takes place in this section and there were some nice stretches of sand. We ate lunch along the bank and then headed back out.
We continue our journey, navigating around the large side canyons of Buck Canyon and Gooseberry Canyon. We also passed Monument Basin with its multitude of spires and columns.
Then we drove down to White Crack where I walked out onto the 10 to 30 foot thick white crust that surrounds much of the canyon edge. There were many empty pools, ranging from 4 feet deep and 10 feet across to tiny bowls. Afterwards, we drove to our camping spot on Murphy Hogback.
How often do you get to watch a sunset like this from camp?
The next morning we broke camp and finished the trail. First we had to drop down the hogback and then skirt many more canyons until we drove alongside the Green River. I was suprised by the number of steep hillclimbs there were along the river in this section. Once we hit Mineral Bottom we took the switchbacks up onto the mesa.
This trail had a surprising amount of variety, with some slickrock, sand, dirt, rock, steepness and narrow shelf. And it was actually a little more difficult than I thought it would be... not hard, but 4-5 areas where solid four low range is necessary. This road beat expectations and I had some real good company along the way. Thanks to Michael and Jose for coming along, this will be a trip well remembered!
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