Day 191 (HDT 7)

Day 191 (HDT 7): 11 miles

It was a cold night last night. I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that my quilt was inside out and the toe box was useless. It was already wet with dew so I couldn’t flip it around. I woke up because I felt like I might throw up again. I’m not sure what’s going on with my stomach.

We got moving slower this morning with the cold but we began our descent into Fable Valley. It was a nice descent with actual game trail for a lot of it which was nice having a path to follow. After reaching the bottom and hiking in the thick wash for a bit, we began to climb out of the canyon. It was a real bitch.

It felt like anytime we got going we’d hit a pour off and have to climb a long way around in the side of the canyon to get on the rim and then reconnect with the wash we were climbing out of. There were a few pour offs where we reached them and there wasn’t an obvious route so we had to backtrack to find a way.

By the time we finally reached Dark Canyon Plateau and got out of the canyon we were both pretty tried and had hardly done 7 miles and it was 1:30. Fable Valley was a real hotel California, easy to get in, hard to get out.

The sky started to look pretty ugly up on the plateau and it soon began to rain and hail. We took shelter under some trees before continuing on after it stopped. But we didn’t make it much further. As we were approaching the wash we would descend into Young’s Canyon, we heard the ominous sound of rushing water, a peculiarly out here in the Utah desert.

When we reached it, we saw a waterfall rushing down into the wash and flowing healthily. If it was flowing this much at the top of the wash, it must be raging farther down. We set up camp for a few hours and I planned on being done for the day, but the water stopped flowing later and Fancy Feast talked me into doing 3 more miles and camping on the rim of Young’s Canyon. We covered the miles and made it up there just in time for a fluorescent sunset. The climb out of young’s canyon wasn’t bad, but when we reached the top we saw the massive sure-death cliff that we would’ve eventually hit if we kept following the canyon.