Celebrity Canyon

The pandemic and social media stardom transform a remote geologic wonder

I first hiked in Buckskin Gulch, a slot canyon on the Utah-Arizona border in Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, in December 1996. I was in the area on a reporting assignment, covering the first release of captive-reared California condors into the wild outside of California, and I sought the canyon’s solitude as an antidote to the crowd of hundreds who had gathered the day before to witness the event.

This occurred long before such multitudes could be summoned into existence almost instantly via social media. But the historic nature of the condor release — a critical step in the long, expensive and often controversial effort to bring the huge raptor back from the brink of extinction — had drawn an unusual amount of attention. In attendance that day were throngs of birders, a score of TV crews, a U.S. senator, the Arizona governor, the secretary of the Interior, biologists, countless employees of state and federal agencies, caravans of school buses. There were parties, press briefings, and speeches.

In contrast, I had Buckskin Gulch almost entirely to myself on that bitterly cold December morning. The canyon is etched into the sandstone of the Paria Plateau, which sits at nearly 7,000 feet in elevation, and as I hiked, my boots crunched through an icy crust covering the mud and pools of water on the canyon floor. It’s a remote place, still reached only by a rutted dirt road, and in 1996 — two years before Google was founded, more than a decade before the release of the first iPhone — the only way to find out about it was word of mouth and hiking guidebooks. Even on a warm spring day the canyon would not have seen much traffic a quarter-century ago.

Perhaps it might still be possible to find solitude there, particularly on a frigid midwinter morning. But after my most recent experience at Buckskin Gulch, I kind of doubt it.

Playing the slots

My partner Leslie and I recently returned from a two-week trip around the Southwest in our Next Chapter adventure van. We drove from Ventura to St. George, Utah, on April 25, spent the night in a hotel, and then headed the next day toward the Vermillion Cliffs. We turned off pavement, clattered down the dirt road that leads to the Buckskin Gulch trailhead, and followed a narrow side track to a well-used boondocker campsite — a wide spot with a rock fire ring on public land, where we could park the rig overnight.

The next day, we drove to Page, Ariz., to meet up with the guide for our visit to Antelope Canyon on the Navajo Nation (more on that in a future post), but we came back to camp at the same site for a second night so we could hike Buckskin the following morning.

Buckskin Gulch is legendary among members of the hiking community. It’s a classic Southwestern slot canyon, deep and narrow, and joins Paria Canyon about 20 miles downstream. Paria, in turn, leads ultimately to the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry; the two canyons together comprise more than 40 miles of twisting, eroded passageway between towering walls of ruddy sandstone. Near its confluence with Paria, Buckskin Gulch is more than 400 feet deep and the walls are so close together that you can touch both at the same time with outstretched arms. Direct sunlight only reaches the canyon floor at midday, so it’s generally dark and cool.

Leslie in Buckskin Gulch.

There are two main routes into the canyon. The Buckskin Gulch trailhead route leads directly into the canyon at its head. The route from Wire Pass trailhead passes through its own narrow slot passages before reaching a confluence with Buckskin about 5 miles downstream from the other trailhead. Both trailheads are located along House Rock Road, an unpaved track that runs north-south for 30 miles along the west side of Vermillion Cliffs. (The 1996 condor release site was located off this road, about 3 miles from its southern terminus.)

On both of my previous visits — including an April 2014 trip with Leslie, when we cut short the hike because of questionable weather conditions (never hike in a slot canyon when rain might be in the forecast) — I used the Wire Pass route. The trailhead then was a simple affair: a small dirt parking area, a trail register, permit kiosk and vault toilet. And there were very few other hikers.

That’s no longer the case. When we left our campsite in the morning of April 28 and drove to Wire Pass, we found it utterly transformed. There was a huge graveled parking lot, new restroom facilities, and a complicated permit system that required an Internet connection to buy a day-use pass online at Recreation.gov. And the lot was crowded by dozens of cars, vans, RVs, pickups with camper shells, most of them bearing license plates from other states.

Leslie struck up a conversation with a BLM employee in the parking lot and learned that the agency had undertaken a huge expansion of the facility in 2021, after the trailhead was overrun by a crush of visitors in 2020. The twin scourges of our age — the COVID-19 pandemic, which drove huge increases in visitation to so many outdoor recreation sites across the country, and the ability to share images and location coordinates for once-isolated scenic destinations via social media — had turned Wire Pass into a major tourist destination.

The trailhead now draws not just hordes of slot-canyon hikers, but also those lucky souls able to score a permit via lottery to visit The Wave, a ridiculously photogenic sandstone formation in the nearby Coyote Buttes area, which formerly required sophisticated cross-country route-finding ability to reach.

The BLM guy said he spent a day last year on a nearby ridge, taking a photo of the parking lot every 20 minutes. At the end of the day, he and his colleagues sorted through the images, counting the number of unique vehicles. They tallied more than 700. So many hikers were in the canyon that there was a two-hour wait to climb a ladder allowing passage over a boulder blocking a narrow spot.

We enjoyed our hike in spite of the canyon’s newfound celebrity. It was a beautiful day, and our timing could not have been better; midday sun streamed into the canyon’s depths and set the carved sandstone walls aglow. We found a sandy alcove in which to lay out our picnic lunch, and although we encountered other people, it never felt crowded. It was certainly nothing like the reported crush of a year earlier.

Just the same, we will probably plan any future visit for a frosty day in December.