Our first stop was to Red Hollow near Orderville. This is a short and colorful slot that I knew would be highly questionable because of its higher altitude (close to 6000'). My suspicions were correct. We encountered quit a bit of snow in the slot since it receives little to no sunlight.
The crusty snow actually made for a fun and unique hiking experience. Instead of stemming up and over some of the chockstones and dry falls, we were able to easily climb over these obstacles by carving steps in the snow!
Red Hollow was a lot of fun, but we figured if it wasn't still full of snow by the time our trip rolled around, it would definitely be full of ice-cold water. I love watery narrows but I don't think everyone would have enjoyed it, so Red Hollow got the axe from the itinerary.
Next, we drove over near the Coral Pink Sand Dunes to check out the Moccassin Mountain dinosaur tracksite. We were impressed. It's a scenic location and the kids had a lot of fun looking for the tracks. I planned on having this be one of the stops on the treasure hunt, but we never made it out there on spring break due to the snow!
We next checked out the South Fork Indian Canyon pictographs also near the Coral Pinks. The road was a little muddy and rough and anything bigger than a Jeep would get some fresh desert pin striping. This too, is a very scenic area and it's a great little hike to get the blood pumping. In the end, we figured the road was too rough for the vehicles we would have during spring break, and the drive from pavement was too long to shuttle people back and forth. So it also got axed.
Peek-a-Boo slot -- no to be confused with the slot with the same name in the Escalante drainage -- had been on my to-do list for some time. The road into the slot from near the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary was just about the sandiest road I'd ever driven. I didn't get stuck, but I ended up letting some air out of the tires to try to get a little more flotation. The slot is short but very photogenic. If you don't mind dealing with the sand, I highly recommend it. As much as I wanted to do this slot on spring break, I knew the sand would be tough so it was taken off the schedule.
The last place we scouted was the "Crocodile Cave" in Angel Canyon. Way cool place. This lake in the bottom of a cave was destined to be a major part of the treasure hunt. But as you'll see in a later post, I screwed this stop up pretty good on spring break.
Above: Junior explorers look for crocodiles.
All the spring break photos are coming soon.
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