IO: VMO+: Utah Grand Staircase / Escalante area

Steve and I are planning on heading back to Utah at the end of April 2018. The current notion is to do a few 2-3 day loops to explore some canyons in the Escalante region.

This will be primarily a backpacking trip. You'll want some prior experience with rock scrambling, but we don't currently intend there to be anything beyond class 3 as I'm not going to carry a rope. With that said, I haven't planned out our route yet.

The current thought is:

• 2-3 days - exploring another canyon system off of Hole-in-the-Rock road
• 2-3 days - Death Box Wilderness area. With a name like that, how can we go wrong?
• 2-3 days - 2nd canyon off of Hole in the Rock. Or maybe making the long drive to the Maze or Needles district of Canyonlands NP.

We'll front country camp for the first night on BLM land. Probably stay at a hotel in Vegas the last night if we're taking a morning flight back. The current notion is about 9 days in Utah with a day on either end for travel. The start and end date might shift by a day in either direction based on what cheap tickets are available. We'll pin down the dates when we shop for our flights. Steve and I will likely fly on one of the non-stops from BWI on Southwest Air.

I've currently set the limit to six, as it's the smallest group size limit that I'm aware of for these activities. If we hit that limit, I can check to see if all of our activities have a limit as high as 8. For LNT reasons, I'm not going to take more than 10 in any case.

Here's our trip report for last year which includes some backpacking in Escalate:

https://www.meetup.com/DC-UL-Backpacking/events/236042318/

The current thought is to leave the canyoneering out this time so as to reduce the technical pre-reqs and gear required, but we've also toyed with maybe spending a day doing some moderately technical canyons. For budgeting, figure on around $1,400 per person for the trip this year.

Please note that much of the trip may be re-planned due to weather, so don't get too attached to the notion of any particular backpacking loop. In particular, Hole-in-the-Rock road is not passable for 24 hrs after rainstorms,

Due to the length of the trip, it's posted as Invite Only, which just means that we're manually approving people for the trip instead of giving a blanket yes. If you're interested, email me at aplydon at gmail.com.

By RSVPing to this trip or any other DC UL trip, you agree to DC UL's liability waiver. https://www.meetup.com/DC-UL-Backpacking/pages/Liability_Waiver/