An alternate reality on the Hayduke Trail

The wind howls around my tent as I write this. I’ve had to reinforce the stakes with ever heavier rocks twice now, and the weather report predicts high winds with gusts up to 35 miles/hr until tomorrow morning. After which, it will start raining.

Not the ideal conditions for an ultralight tent that has been staked out in rocky Utah soil, I’ll admit. But on the plus side: the sleepless hours will finally give me some time to write about my first days on the Hayduke trail.

As you can read in my previous article, I was rather nervous before starting my hike. It seemed a big undertaking for small me. The challenge has not diminished, now that I’ve been on the trail for five days, but my anxiety has somewhat. To ease my worries somewhat: a friend from back home (Hummingbird) joined me for the first few sections, and it made for an easier and less frightening start than it would otherwise have been.

Where am I now?

Let me take just a few steps back and tell you about my journey so far. I’m now five days in to this adventure, and it has been everything I’ve hoped for so far. Hard, challenging, beautiful, sobering, life changing. All these things and more. 

Before I started my hike, I spent 28 days rafting down the Grand Canyon, and that in itself was already the trip of a lifetime. A magic journey into a place that was more gorgeous and breathtaking than I could have anticipated. I left a piece of my heart behind in that canyon. While rowing past the places I knew I would soon visit on foot, the anticipation for the hike built. I even got to hike part of the Hayduke while there already. I can honestly say I cannot wait to go back there in a few months’ time and see it all again.

Straight after my exit out of the canyon, I had to start getting ready for the trail. In three days, Hummingbird and I drove a rental car from Vegas to Moab, stopping along the way to place caches in four locations.

They were long days, but they afforded us a better look at the places I would soon visit, and allowed us to do some sightseeing along the way.

And now, as I write this during this stormy night, waiting out the winds, we are half way through section 2 of the trail. If all goes well, we will arrive at Needles Outpost in Canyonlands National Park the day after tomorrow. Just over 60 miles into the official route, but we have hiked many more miles than that, as we’ve already done three alternates.

Why the alternate routes?

Starting at the airport near Moab, after handing in the rental car, it took about ten miles to get to the start. Or near to it, anyway. The Hayduke trail (or HDT) doesn’t have a terminus and its official starting point is rather in the middle of nowhere easy to get to. A popular alternate starting point, therefore, is Devil’s Garden trailhead. 

We took the Devil’s Garden loop alternate through Arches national park as well, but it just took a while to get there from the airport. I would certainly recommend doing this alternate, as this is a gorgeous area that will give you a real taste for the amazing geography of this place.
To get ready for my trip, I read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, about his time as a ranger in this area in the sixties. He already bemoans the hordes of people who visit this place by car, and I could not agree with him more. This place needs to be discovered on foot!

But it certainly made for a long and tiring first day, and it certainly wasn’t as isolated as I’m hoping the rest of the trail will be. The next day saw some more remoteness, as we followed the contours of a buried pipeline across the land. The occasional footsteps in the sand we encountered were the only signs that others had gone here before.

The second alternate we chose to do was into Moab itself. To make our start easier and get used to the trail conditions out there, we had decided to do the first three days as a trial run, then get back to Moab and stay there for one more night to pick up food and make any last minute changes to our setups.

Again, this worked out well, as the desert was not completely alien to us after hiking the PCT, but it still took us some getting used to again.

Our third alternate up until now served to get us off a busy road full of dust whirling ATV’s on a weekend afternoon and was half improvised by us on the spot, half existing. 

Tired of the alternates yet?

The short answer? Definitely not! The magic of the HDT is that it’s very much a ‘create your own

demise adventure’ kind of route. 
We are planning to venture into Canyonlands more than the original route does.
If there’s time, I’d like to add a detour through Bryce Canyon as well. And undoubtedly, there will be others. 
The sheer sense of freedom this loose interpretation of the route brings me, is exhilarating, I have to admit. 
But it does bring with it an extra need to plan ahead, never my strongest point. 
I guess I’ll just have to up my game! 

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