4-Wheel Driving Smokey Mtn Road Escalante, Utah

As of 1pm today, 78 miles of Smokey Mountain Road is open with some sections needing high-clearance vehicles. Its not everyday you can drive this dirt road along the Kaiparowitz Plateau to Page, Arizona. Rain, wind & snow play havoc on this slow winding remote road. You'll want to go slow because you can miss this cache along side of the road or other ruins on the way to Lake Powell. The rugged desert landscape had long shadows as we descended into Big Water, Utah.
After spending the night in Page, Az, we headed back in search of an interesting hike. There are countless old ranch roads that go no where and that was fine with us. We walked a double-track ATV road that seem to connect with Last Chance Canyon for over 2 hours. Perhaps next exploration we'll ride our mountain bikes and find where the ATV track meets Last Chance Canyon.
Closer to Escalante, we had a rare glimpse of the elusive "Fins," tall castle-like fortress, lit up in the late afternoon sun. We recognized our next adventure off Smokey Mountain Road: to find a route to climb these secluded rock fins.

Friendly Flash Flood

We saw all the symptoms of an impending flash flood: dark grey clouds over our westerly direction, thunder despite our sunshine, a 20 minute cloudburst, the creeping foamy trickle of water, newly formed waterfalls. Then our previous dry canyon became a ripply river within a minute.
Yet, the worse fear I had was my shoes getting wet. We had found a rock over-hang while the cloud busted open and ate lunch. Caramel, a Boxer dog, drank rain water that streamed off the overhang as if was coming from a Camelback tube. Later, she played in the foamy water by tossing up the foam in the air and catching it. We watched water shoot through conical slickrock chutes. As we continued to hike up Mitchell Canyon, we stayed higher than the caramel-colored river and hopped on rocks when we had to cross the rising river. We managed to record the GPS coordinates of "Sand Dollar Rock" (our objective) and I didn't get my shoes wet until the last crossing to the truck. The drive down Alvey Wash road was another story: How not to get your vehicle stuck in the mud. Not all floods are nice.