Weekend in Grand Staircase-Escalante (Lower Calf Creek Falls + Peek-a-boo & Spooky Slot Canyons)

This is something you would not expect to see in this desert climate. I'm stuck. I'm stuck. Okay. We've driven about two hours east of Parowan, Utah and this weekend we're exploring in and around the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which is over 1 million acres of protected land in southern Utah. This area is home to rugged, unique, and gorgeous scenery and over the next two days we're going to experience beautiful and exhilarating hikes, scenic and rough drives, and delicious local eats. Also, just a quick side note, we've always pronounced it Escalante, but we've recently learned that locals pronounce it either Escalant or Escalani. So, just a quick apology here. We don't know how it's going to come out of our mouths or even which way is the right way to say it. For our first hike of the weekend, we're hiking to Lower Calf Creek Falls, which is an iconic hike in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It's about five and a half to six miles. We've read some conflicting things, so we're not totally sure and it costs five dollars to access this trail, but it's free if you have the America the Beautiful National Parks Pass. One thing to note that's really cool and interesting about the trail is all along the trail so far has been these signposts that are dotted along. They give you a little bit of information about the trail and apparently one around here, number six, even though this is number five, there's a granary across the way. It says, high on the cliff across the creek is a storage structure built more than 800 years ago by prehistoric people who lived in the canyons. We call this culture the Fremont. Assorted food items and seeds were stored in these structures. That's really interesting. You've got to keep an eye out for it across the way. And we had read to make sure that you stop and read the signs along the way, but they're not actual signs with information. They're just number posts and we're using the AllTrails app to basically click on pins on the map and see the story that goes along with it. However, it's proving to not be super accurate, so just keep that in mind. But we think there's a brochure at the trailhead which probably has all the stories for all the posts so you can read as you hike. This is spectacular. Oh my gosh. Massive. This is something you would not expect to see in this desert climate. Waterfall in the desert. What? It makes it even more beautiful. Wow. So the waterfall is about 126-ish feet tall. Everywhere we read said something a little different, but the area is called Calf Creek because the canyon is kind of box-like, so it served as kind of a natural area to house calves in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We know we talk about crowds in like every single video, but we just really like hiking without a ton of people around and the trail was definitely getting busier when we left, but we just saw 20 cars trying to turn in and there's no more parking left. The parking lot is full. It's 10 15 a.m. We started right at 7. Took us three hours to do the hike, so start early. We're such a broken record, but we just want y'all to have the same like solitude experience that we have because it's just so much better that way. We headed up the road to Boulder, Utah to grab brunch at a spot called Magnolia Street Food, which is this bright blue school bus, food truck, food bus. Hefty, hefty. Just the way I like it. I've been thinking about this burrito for days actually and especially this morning on the hike. Just been so hungry. Worked up quite an appetite. So this is the poncho and lefties burrito. Let me tell you what's inside this. So it has eggs, carnitas, grilled potatoes, onions, roasted green chilies, and cotija cheese. Damn. That is out of this world amazing. So dang good. You got tons of the grilled veggies in there, the onions, the green peppers right there, the pork. There's salsa all in there. The, what is this? Tortilla is nice and got some little burnt pieces, little crispy bits. The griddled potatoes are just so griddled and they taste like buttery and oh man, this is an amazing burrito. It says scrambled eggs on the menu, but this is definitely more over easy, which in my opinion takes it to the next level. You get some of the yolk there a little bit runny. Would you say you're a breakfast burrito connoisseur? I would like to consider that myself as a breakfast burrito connoisseur. I do dabble in many breakfast burritos when I get the chance. This is a top notch one. A plus plus plus. And I got some tacos. It's been so long since we've had tacos on the vlog and I'm so excited. So I got the picadillo, which is ground beef and there's a bunch of other goodies in there. It looks like cotija cheese, some carrots, some jalapenos, looks nice and juicy. Like it's got some good seasonings on there. And then this one is the Carlos, I think is what it was called. And it's a bunch of, uh, like kind of a crispy carnitas pork. The pork is so good. It has a nice crisp to it. And then they threw in some peppers, he said, cause it has normally pickled onions in the pork one, but I don't really like onions. So put in some, I don't know. They kind of just like pickled peppers. I'm not really sure what they are. It gives it such a good tang and the salsa is so fresh and good. And then the crunchiness of the kind of the cabbage on top. Oh man. So good. Onto the next one. That is perfectly seasoned ground beef. It's just like the classic growing up. I would just get like ground beef tacos or make them at home and stuff. And it just kind of brings you back to that, but it's so high quality, so flavorful, a little spicy. It might be the salsa. These are both so good. Just down the road from Magnolia street food is the Burr trail road, which is a scenic drive. And it's named after a guy named John Burr, who was a cattle rancher here in the area in the 1800s. He needed a route to take his cattle between ranges for summer and winter and also to market. So he created this route and trail that goes over really rough and rugged and previously impassable terrain. And it became known as the Burr trail. So the Burr trail goes from Boulder, where we are now, all the way down to bullfrog Marina at Lake Powell. And it goes through the grand staircase area, part of Capitol Reef National Park, as well as Glen Canyon. We aren't going to do the entire thing because we have a very treacherous drive we will be making hopefully in a little bit. So we're going to just do as much as we can. And there's this one area in particular that looks really cool that we're going to try to go check out. I've just never seen anything like this before. It's like driving down a giant red hallway. It just goes for miles and miles. We just can't get ourselves to stop driving. The scenery is just going on forever and ever. We just want to keep seeing what's next. It's incredible. We forced ourselves to turn around. We could have driven all the way to Lake Powell. The views were breathtaking. Just mind-blowing the scenery out here and the like sheer rock walls. It's just absolutely crazy. But we have a couple more things we wanted to do today. So we're heading back up. We just actually drove from all the way down there. That's Long Canyon down there. And this is kind of the iconic Burr trail view. If you google Burr trail this is probably the photo you will see on google images. But we just drove up this and we're going to head back to the main highway. We headed back towards the Escalante area and we stopped off at this place called Kiva Coffee House which is this awesome coffee shop with a sick view. Just basically built into the side of the hill kind of looks like. Off the highway. Yeah. It's the coolest. Look at this view. Yeah. It's all around. It's probably the sickest coffee shop view we've ever had in our entire life. We haven't even tried our drinks yet but I already know they'll be good. They gotta be good. Fantastic view. Fantastic coffee. And now for part of the day that we've been dreading all day long and if we're being honest for several weeks now we're gonna drive the Hole in the Rock Road. This is a 62 mile one-way dirt and gravel road that runs from Escalante, Utah down to Hole in the Rock on the western shore of Lake Powell. This road follows the general route of the Hole in the Rock expedition which occurred in 1879 when Mormon settlers were trying to build a new route for a new settlement on the San Juan River. They found a shortcut going down the road that we're about to drive on but after arriving the shortcut proved to be challenging as the terrain was mostly impassable. The only way they could get to the Colorado River from this plateau was across the rugged terrain and finally down a sheer cliff dropping into what's now Lake Powell. The group spent the winter at an area called 40 Mile Spring and for six weeks a portion of them worked on chiseling and blasting a path through a narrow crack called Hole in the Rock so they could continue their journey down. Today the road is still very rough with tons of washboards but thankfully we only have to go 26 of the 62 miles. However we know it's going to take us a very long time especially in the van and we're kind of planning on it taking two hours. We've read that most cars can get there just fine as long as you have a lot of patience a lot of time can stand a little bit or a lot of rattling so we're gonna give it a shot. Someone wrote on all trails that they thought their jeep would fall apart and then someone else wrote that they saw mufflers on the ground. Several mufflers. So I don't know we'll see if it's too rough we'll turn around. I think we'll make it I've read a lot a lot about it as much as we could like like 10 pages deep on google searches so just to get every little tidbit on it just to be safe so we'll see. Here we go it's gonna be good gonna be great let's go. He is not nervous at all. That is a seven months of hard work falling apart. We saw our first muffler on the side of the road. Well we didn't make it in two hours but we have seen so many cute baby cows, calves. We made it we made it in one piece yeah the cabinets are still up the only thing that fell was that window cover. How did that happen? That's a win. It took us about two hours and 15 minutes to get out here it honestly wasn't that bad I'd say the last like third it was really sandy and really washboardy but other than that I think we've been on worse roads the road out to wire pass might be a little worse but it's just long it wasn't bad at all though we got passed by yeah we went really slow we got passed by lots of cars we probably averaged like 10 to 15 miles an hour so if you're in a regular car you could get you could do this probably in like half the time but for us since this is our house we have to be much much much slower but we came to the lower dry fork trailhead area but you can't actually camp overnight at trailhead so we're in the overflow parking area and we got this free overnight camping permit from the visitor center the other day so we can camp but we are staying here tonight because tomorrow morning we are going to hike the dry fork peekaboo spooky slot canyons and it's gonna be really fun the dry fork peekaboo and spooky slot canyons are similar to the wire pass and buckskin gulch that we did quite a few vlogs ago in the sense that they're slot canyons but the biggest difference here is that this is more of an exhilarating adventure you have to climb up into some of the slot canyons and then in the spooky one you have to squeeze through some very tight and narrow spaces which if you're claustrophobic you definitely will not want to do this hike or maybe even watch the rest of this video they recommend packing as light as possible so we've got our smallest backpack and packed with our minimal gear so that we can fit through these tight spaces and they also recommend not to bring a dog just because it'd be really difficult for them one thing we did read on multiple reports on all trails and some other websites was that it gets kind of tricky to follow the trail and sometimes along the way there are stacks of cairns so make sure to follow those to kind of keep your way on the path or download the offline all trails map which so far has been super super helpful there's basically no self-service out here so definitely download it in advance so we took a wrong turn i went way down the hill had to come back up so we're out of breath it's not necessarily wrong you can do it kind of any way you like but for our plan it was wrong we want to do the dry fork narrows first according to all trails we like missed a whole part of the trail but we just kind of follow the dirt sandy path where all the footprints were it looks like we're about to meet up with the the main trail i don't know i read it was confusing but this is actually more confusing than i thought it would be but i think i think we got it i think we're about to enter the dry fork narrows i can't cross my fingers in these gloves wrong way again we thought we were going right because it's a little bit of a narrow section but we went down two or three little um drop downs and then there's a big drop down right here this is apparently i guess like a side canyon into the dry fork narrows because it's just right there but uh it's probably not safe to go down that one okay we backtracked a little bit and we found the safe correct entrance to the dry fork narrows we have reached the end of the dry fork narrows back out into the sunlight now on to peek a boo narrows which from what we've read you have to climb up pretty high to get into it like on purpose unlike before when we accidentally almost had to climb down yeah that's a pretty big climb it looks like there's some places you can kind of put your feet and stuff so that helps but yeah there's definitely some footholds and definitely you kind of take it in stages as you'll see but i read it's about 12 feet 10 to 12 feet yeah there's nowhere really to grab onto all right we made it up this little area here the entrance to it it was steep and slick and the footholds weren't as good as i thought yeah a little sketchy i was heart racing adam made it most of the way up and then someone was coming so he came back down and then that kind stranger helped us kind of get up yeah i was like a team effort i was like i'll let him go first and watch how he does it and he made it up pretty quickly and he kind of helped us and gave us encouragement this is nuts there are two arches in the slot canyon oh my god it gets really tight it's really narrow right there oh my gosh this isn't so narrow and this isn't even the narrow one yet this is just a such a fun and unique type of a hike because you just get to climb over a bunch of stuff it's like a human like jungle gym adult adult jungle gym what i'm trying to say oh man no it's it's incredible so far it's we've been in some slot canyons before and they may have been like bigger and taller but this one is like really adventurous two slot canyons down and a spooky one to go we just got to the famous 15 foot drop in the spooky slot canyon there's some ropes to help but it looks kind of sketchy so it's basically a tunnel you go through yeah you're all the way down there thank you i'll get closer that works perfect things all right camera's going away so we don't die i don't like this hole that's right here yeah okay all right now yeah i kind of like turned around and kind of put my feet against here and use these loops i almost just want you to come grab me and you did it i made it down i didn't i didn't think it looked as scary at the top but when you're sitting on this rock you have this huge drop yeah big shout out to josh he has made us feel so much safer on this trail by helping guide us so basically you like scoot your way down to this rock and then you get on this one and you use this rope to essentially repel down this wall we couldn't film it it was just too many just too much trying to figure out how to safely get down but just take our word for it if you don't like heights and drop-offs you will not like this part this part's gonna be tricky climb down into a narrow slot oh man this part is kind of scary i'm stuck i'm stuck okay i don't know what to do with my foot it's like kind of stuck oh this is super graceful that's a sketchy one that's a it's tight yeah you just kind of got to like use the walls to your advantage a little bit this is really fun made it out just barely just skinned by huh i don't know if the camera fully captured that hike but it was exhilarating adventurous tight scary fun unlike anything we've ever done oddly enough i didn't feel very claustrophobic at all i don't like caves and being closed in like that but with this i just zoomed through it it was just a ton of fun there are some pretty tricky parts though so getting up into peekaboo and then getting into spooky i guess or getting down i guess technically into spooky halfway through it we didn't film those very well because to be honest we were just trying to not get hurt to not get hurt and just do them safely so we didn't really show them probably at their fullest but we came across someone named josh right when we were entering peekaboo and so we kind of helped each other through both of those tough situations he would encourage us and kind of tell us like help guide us after he went up to tell us how we always made him go first yeah sorry josh but he would kind of help us figure out like where to put our feet and stuff so we are so glad we ran into josh it just made the experience so much better but we've loved the grand staircase escalante area it's just massive there is so much to do here and if we had the right vehicle there would be so much more that we could do so we'll definitely have to come back but this place is just gorgeous gorgeous it just kind of blew my expectations of it out of the water yeah awesome we could stay here for a really long time but unfortunately and fortunately we are now headed to our first new national park of 2021 and here in utah capital reef