Egypt 3 Slot Canyon Expedition

We really wanted to do Coyote Gulch but the 2 mile hike just to get to the slot, in the hot sloggy summer sand, sounded silly! So we declared we would do Egypt, which looked like a quick hike in and a nice slot, but nothing seemed too long. The scale on the map showed that we were only going 2-3 km into the slots. The dirt road to Egypt was really hairy and I gave up driving for Paul, the more experienced sand and rock driver, to take over. We were on trail at 11:15am, starting as early as we could from Kodachrome. It was simple to get to the edge of the slot but hard to figure out how to get in. Here Paul is pointing to the slot that we eventually drop into.

We eventually found some cairns leading us to the slickrock and we went down on the slickrock, even though some of it was steep. The potholes were deep leading into the canyon. We found an easy way in and walked into the Egypt 3 slot.

It was fantastic. We were having the time of our lives. It was twisty and potholey, and there were a lot of dropoffs. I was not completely sure we could make it back up some of those potholes. The slot was tight and twisty and there was an initial drop where you had to turn sideways, suck in your breath, hold you backpack or camelback to the side and carefully slide down the canyon. There were parts that were so slippery that you could do nothing but slide down on your butt, and hope you were wearing long pants so you did not scrape your butt on the way down (i was not). Leo tweaked his ankle at the very onset of the hike but was a trooper and stuck it through.

The slot was awesome. Then we hit the deep, big pothole filled with water. We could not find a way around that didn't result in sliding into the pothole. Paul had to strip (not knowing how deep it was) and jump in and ferry Leo and the backpacks. I had to jump in too. It was only knee deep, but it was stinky old water filled with bugs, mosquito larva, and mud of course. We smelled like that putrid water for the rest of the long day.

Then we hit a Y in the slot and went upslot on a spur. It was so tight, Leo got turned around.

We continued downslot until we hit another Y. It became a long, continuous, straight, extremely narrow slot. All our gear got scraped to death. Leo called it "boring".

Then it got really hard to squeeze through and we had to lean in, climb high sometimes, and then carry our packs sideways and then, then, Leo found the daddy longlegs. Now I don't have a problem with daddy longlegs. I've played with them since I was a kid. But In the deep, clautrophobic slots where you scrape both sides of your body trying to get through, the last thing you want to find is an orgy of 50 daddy longlegs clustered in a dense pack, doing something that you probably don't want your kids to see. There were a dozen of these clusters, sometimes on both sides of the walls so you could only hope to not scrape the cluster down your shirt. I plan to have nightmares about daddy longleg conventions tonight.

We got to the end of the slot, a bit over 2 km from our car, and where the author describes a route back to the road. But Leo really wanted to go back through the daddy longleg infested slot. So we went back through the ultra thin narrows, sucking in our chests, and hoping not to hit the bug orgies. We then thought we could climb out an alternate route through the second Y. It was 4pm.

So we headed up the wash which was immediately difficult. There was a bunch of potholes that you had to get past without getting in because they were too deep. Somehow Paul did one of those cool chimney moves and Leo just automatically copied it, since he spent most of his time messing around on the rocks doing moves like that anyway. I couldn't jam my body against one side and my feet against the other because it was too big. So I had to make an upside down V with my body, facing downward, hands jammed against the steep side and feet jammed against the other side and walk my hands across the potholes. Somehow when I was done, it required some weird balance shift thing that also freaked me out because falling from so high is not fun when you're far from your car in the desert. Anyway, we went up that wash, up the slickrock and then got confused about which rockfall we had originally descended. They all looked the same and it wasn't easy getting from one to the other. We didn't have our GPS or the topo map, just the pages from the hiking book with a hand drawn map. We walked around and over the slick rock hills arguing about the best way back. Meanwhile Leo was getting stomach cramps and intermittently doubling over in pain and it was still hot. It was 6pm. We guessed at where we were and walked up to the top of Egypt Bench, which is sort of the flat mesa top  that looks down on everything else. Our map showed that is was maybe 1/2 km walk west to the car, but the hills were uneven and we had to walk up and down too much to walk west. So we walked north, followed some other human footsteps (there generally weren't many footsteps, mostly cows, rodents, birds, and some hooved animals), staying on the mesa top. We eventually hit the dirt road and backtracked the road back 1/2 mile to our car at about 7pm. It was the longest hike Leo's ever done.

Oh, a few other things - the Forester was making funny noises on the drive out to Utah. The several hours per day on the bumpy dirt roads resulted in the electrical system going wacky a bit on Wed and then more on Fri. For example, we can't turn the lights off on the car without pulling the fuse now.

When we got to Escalante (and I kissed the ground to be in civilization), I was still traumatized by the hike out but not traumatized enough to stop myself from buying a couple more Escalante hiking books including the technical canyoneering book.