Hiking Paria Canyon

By Golden Webb

The beauties and wonders of the Paria River have caused a lot of ink to flow over the years. Featured in such publications as National Geographic, Life, Arizona Highways and Backpacker Magazines, in the writings of Edward Abbey, Ann Zwinger, and Charles Bowden, the stock-in-trade of such photographers as David Muench and Jack Dykinga, it has been described by those who know it to be the best of the longer narrow canyons on the Colorado Plateau. Go down to Barnes & Noble and flip to the back of hiking guidebooks on Utah and Arizona. The Paria will invariably be at or near the top of the authors’ best hikes lists. In 1984 its lower stretches became the heart of the 112,000-acre Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness Area, and in 1996 much of its upper drainage was designated the westernmost portion of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

All this flowing ink and exposed film accelerated the inevitable: 10 years ago rangers were voicing concern over the rising popularity of the lower canyon; estimates for 1988 predicted 3,000 visitors. In 1996 over 10,000 people from around the world came to Paria-Vermilion Cliffs.

Recently I went down to see for myself what all the hubbub was about. On a certain day in late October I emerged through the maw of Buckskin Gulch into the gorge of the Paria River. The Indian summer sky was a flawless blue. High above, the early afternoon sunlight beat down on sandstone the color of dried blood. The ore of the sun’s rays smote the rock, the rock milled and smelted the rays, and the pure gold of the sunlight filtered to the deeps of the canyon in a 24-carat downpour. I seemed to be witness to some kind of natural alchemy, the magical bullion of autumn sun on ochre stone showering down about my head and tired shoulders in translucent sheets of effulgent light.

In Greek mythology Zeus appears to the maiden Danaë in the form of a rain of gold, described by one account as a "numinous golden light." Numinous means divine, supernatural, having a deeply spiritual or mystical effect. The numinous radiance of Zeus’ rain of gold cannot have been more beautiful than the light that saturated the narrows of the Paria. Edward Abbey described a similar impression in Desert Solitaire: "Under a wine-dark sky I walk through light reflected and re-reflected from the walls and floor of the canyon, a radiant golden light that glows on rock and stream, sand and leaf in varied hues of amber, honey, whiskey–the light that never was is here, now, in the storm sculptured gorge of the Escalante." Then 1968, now 1999; the Escalante and the Paria, distant miles apart, but the same Navajo sandstone, the same light, the same effect on a young man walking alone in a desert canyon.

The Upper Paria

The Paria is a rock-shaped river. The canyon through which the Paria flows is river shaped rock. The water that shaped the land was shaped by the land through which it ran, so to speak.

The first thing you notice about the Paria River is the appearance of its water. White, like milk, like the powdery discharge of glacial runoff, the liquid is turbid and has a high mineral content. If you were to drink it unfiltered you’d spend a few weeks in the bathroom, both on the pot and over the sink, flossing out the clay and the grit stuck between your canines and first bicuspids.

This water has traveled many miles, over and through a vast array of earth formations that, taken together, make up what is called the Grand Staircase. The Grand Staircase is a multi-layered geologic wedding cake that stretches from Markagunt Plateau and its Pink Cliffs frosting near Brian Head to the Vishnu schist fudge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It encompasses 30 major geologic formations, six different atmospheric temperate zones, and over 4.5 billion years of earth time. The Grand Staircase is the Rosetta Stone of geology, the key that helps scientists unravel the history of the world as it is inscribed in the stone.

The Paria drops off the eastern flank of the Staircase, down the Pink, Grey, and White "steps" through to the Vermilion Cliffs where it joins the Colorado at Lees Ferry.

The headwaters of the Paria are found atop the Paunsagunt and Table Cliff Plateaus, which form a ring of cliffs that make up the beveled cusp of the Paria Amphitheater. The water emerges near the eroded scarps of Bryce and Powell Point and flows down through the Alligator and the Chinese Wall, the Fairyland and the Blues, to coalesce into the Paria near the town of Tropic.

The Amphitheater is bordered on the southeast by the Cockscomb, a 1,000-foot-high wall of stone that is similar to the Waterpocket Fold of Capitol Reef. A cockscomb is a rooster’s crest, the red, fleshy growth on the heads of roosters. The Cockscomb was so named because of the serrations along its crest, saw-like notches carved into the wall by erosion. It resembles a thousand rough-hewn pyramids marching in serried ranks toward Arizona. The Cockscomb is the northern extension of the East Kaibab Monocline, a flexure or fold in the earth’s crust that begins near the Grand Canyon in Arizona and extends north 100 miles to Canaan Peak near the town of Henrieville. It funnels water south to the Paria and separates the Paria Amphitheater from the Kaiparowitz Plateau to the east

The land reflects the behavior of the fluid it carries, and visa-versa. Hard rocks produce narrow canyons. So it is that within the V formed by the southeastward flowing Paria and the southwestward oriented Cockscomb, where the river cuts into hard Navajo and Wingate sandstones, some of Utah’s narrowest canyons can be found. Bull Valley Gorge, Willis Creek, Hackberry Canyon, Deer Creek Canyon, and Round Valley Draw carve deep into the earth, tapering in places to less than the width of your shoulders.

Where there is Navajo Sandstone there are arches, and the Upper Paria is no exception. The erosional serendipity of the stone has produced Sam Pollock Arch, Starlight Arch, and many other rock spans.

The Lower Paria

The most famous stretch of the Paria begins just south of U.S. 89. As mentioned before, this 37-mile section, from the White House Trailhead to Lees Ferry, is widely considered the most beautiful epic-length narrow canyon in the Southwest.

At the White House Trailhead mounds of gray Page Sandstone cap and intertongue with the red and gray siltstone of the Carmel Formation. Here the canyon is little more than a wide desert wash. A few hard-to-find petroglyph panels grace the western wall.

At mile 0.3 the Paria River begins to cut into Navajo Sandstone. The high cliffs are topped with conical sandstone mounds and hoodoos.

At mile 4 the walls constrict and mark the entrance to the Narrows. Here the canyon walls soar 500 feet into the sky. The stone is sheer and smooth and streaked with purple and metallic blue desert varnish. The milky Paria meanders over wave-patterned mud between banks of wind-patterned sand.

Just before the Paria’s confluence with Buckskin Gulch is Slide Rock Arch, a huge slump block propped against the eastern wall. It forms an aperture or archway through which the Paria occasionally runs. Somehow it broke away from the cliff face, slid down, landed in the streambed, and didn’t come apart in the process. The slab is wide at the top but tapers thin toward the bottom. When I was there the Paria was flowing around to the right of the block, the base of the slab dry and anchored deep into current-swirled mud and clay. A pool of beached river water shimmered underneath and reflected the afternoon light. In other seasons the river flows directly beneath it. Stripping and trimming at the dwindling base, the water slowly undermines the stone and dooms the block–eventually–to a great toppling fall.

Just below Slide Rock Arch the Narrows really narrow. The walls pull to within 15 feet of each other. The music of the water echoes off the walls. Here the universe is simple and sweet, just blue sky, smooth stone, wet mud, clean sand, and cold water swirling to the sea.

Debris caught in overhangs is a reminder of flash floods. Storms from as far away as Bryce can send 50 foot high walls of frothing mud, gnashing boulders and spinning logs through this narrow stone corridor at a speed much faster than a man can run. Imagine a stampede of bulls or stallions, include a few razor-edged blades, pour in a thick soup of silt, add the swirl of a blender, and you have yourself a vivid visualization of a flash flood. Rangers estimate that the Paria and its major tributary, Buckskin Gulch, flash about 8 times a year. The vast majority of these floods occur in July, August, and early September.

Past the Buckskin confluence the Paria is just one long never-ending golden canyon of delight.

Groves of cottonwoods reach upward toward the sun, triangular leaves fluttering in the breeze. Seeps and springs moisten the canyon walls and provide nourishment for luxurious growths of blue columbine, lupine, maidenhair fern, and scarlet monkey flower. Princes plume, sedges, and horsetail anchor moist sand bars.

Search the mud for raven and great horned owl feathers. Search the sky for bald and golden eagles, peregrine falcons, red-tailed hawks, and Cooper’s hawks. Watch the walls and inner canyon for killdeer, white-throated swifts, and violet-green swallows. Wake up early to spot black-chinned hummingbirds. Wade the flowing water with great blue herons or search the mud for their tracks.

If your stars are lucky you’ll see a fox or a mountain lion. If you don’t see a coyote, jackrabbit, cottontail, squirrel, bat, and kangaroo rat, you either stink or you’re blind. Cliffs and crags provide pathways for desert bighorn sheep, successfully reintroduced to Paria Canyon in the 1980s. Mule deer are the resident ghosts of Paria, hard to spot in the flesh, but easy to track over wet mud and sand.

When the sun is warm on the rock the chuckwallas come out to bask. Leopard, collared, and desert spiny lizards move quickly and can disappear in the blink of an eye. Red-spotted toads are squat and funny looking and make beautiful evening music. Their tadpoles squirm through warm backwater. Rattlesnakes rattle before you step on them. They don’t want to bite you any more than you want to be bitten. If you hear a rattle, stop cold, listen, back off, and go another way. Scorpions hang out in dead wood, under rocks, or, in the cold of the night, inside your boots. Shake it out before you put it on.

At mile 20.5 Wrather Canyon branches to the west. Near its head is Wrather Arch, one of the largest rock spans on the Colorado Plateau. It arcs down over 200 feet from the 1,000 foot canyon wall to the floor below.

Over the last 17 miles of the Paria the river cuts down through the Kayenta, Moenave, Chinle, Shinarump Conglomerate, and Moekopi formations.

The Vermilion color of the Kayenta comes from iron oxide, part of the cement that holds the clear sand grains together.

In the Moenave the river becomes boulder strewn, the riverbed fluted and ribbed.

Banded mounds and deep beds of volcanic ash in the Chinle are of the same materials that make up the Painted Desert in Arizona.

The deep-fluted Moenkopi cliffs contain lenses and veins of Gypsum. Heaps of mud-cracked flagstone lie in rubble at the Moenkopi cliffs’ bases.

Lonely Dell Ranch, near Lees Ferry, is the homestead John D. Lee carved out of the desert before he was executed by firing squad for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. He established his ferry in 1871.

Lees Ferry is the Greenwich of Colorado River navigation, mile zero on the Colorado. It has marked the beginning of countless river trips down into the greatest gorge of them all. It is mile 39 for Paria Canyon adventurers, and marks the end of the one of the greatest gorges in the world. Looking back north from Lonely Dell at the canyon of the Paria, one can see a dazzling display of all the canyon’s formations, stacked one atop the other to a height of over 2,800 feet above the river.

The water made a path through all that stone, through all those years, and here you are, your feet wet with that water. The light of the red-hot sun reflects off the ochre rock. The pure gold of the sunlight is milled from the rays and the bullion showers down into the canyon bottom.

Why is gold so valuable? Because it is the physical embodiment of pure light. What produces such pure light? The sun on desert stone. Where to go to see such an amazing sight? The golden gorges of the Paria.

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