Indian Creek vista and the San Juan Mountains

Tom Grundy's Indian Creek 2007 Trip Report Page

Indian Creek scenery from the fin

Indian Creek is a famous crack climbing location located outside of the East entrance of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. It features many splitter vertical cracks in miles of Triassic Wingate sandstone cliffs (with excellent desert varnish and crossbedding for the geo-geek). I have climbed there a few times before, but only for up to a few days at a time, and I was excited to be finally going there for a bit longer.
Previous trip pages include 2006, and 2000 (Dawn's trip report)

March 16th, Julie picked me up, and we hitched up her shadow cruiser trailer and headed up to the creek. We got there late at night and crashed at newspaper rock, We were going to meet Josh at the broken tooth parking area, but we saw him that morning and set up camp next to his little trailer (the broken tooth spot was taken). Then we headed off for some crack climbing in the shade (it was unseasonably hot in the sun). The next 10 days featured a succession of crack climbs of various difficulties. Mostly we climbed things that were fat fingers through thin hands. I started out taping my hands, but it didn't help me get my fat hands into the thin hands cracks, so I abandoned the tape unless I knew the climb featured some fat hand jams (like king cat). As the days progressed, I gradually wore holes in the back of my hands and knuckles making jamming a little more difficult and painful. The most damage was on the last climbing day though, especially when I slipped out of a jam and caught myself (painfully) with my elbow without weighting the rope. Despite the fact that we only climbed 2 to 4 or 5 climbs a day, some of them were up to 160 feet or so, and we were usually pretty beat by the end of the day. I think I improved my rattly fingers / thin hands technique a bit during the trip, and I was a little less intimidated by the long leads, so that was nice. Still, that is a rough size for me. We usually had pretty relaxed starting times, and ended up making it back to the car just as one would think about finding a headlamp many evenings.

Some of the areas we climbed at were the fin, reservoir wall, pistol whipped, spark wall, cat wall, and the second meat wall, all of which were new areas for me.

Julie, Josh, and two fly trailers at camp

The natives making pictographs were polydactylic

Julie belays

I head up Nagasaki while Josh belays

Julie took off after 3 days of climbing to head back to Flagstaff to work, but she left her trailer up there. I generously watched after it. It is pretty sweet living compared to the little truck... Anybody have a little lightweight trailer they want to donate to the cause? Then she came back on a rainy day for more climbing and to take me back to Flagstaff.

In the middle of the trip Tereza (Josh's wife), Bianca (see Grand Canyon trip report) and her dog Slick, and Wynn came to visit for a few days. It was nice to have visitors, especially the first night when we got back to camp to a campfire and dinner under way. The next day they went for a hike in Canyonlands and Wynn was tired and lagged behind (Bianca wanted to get some exercise after sitting in a vehicle too much for safari in Africa. Somehow on the way back they missed each other, and Wynn ended up spending a cold night out with only long pants and a fleece jacket. A search was arranged for the next morning, and we got about 5 hours of sleep before heading back into the park before sunrise to be ready to help. She ran into one of the searching rangers on the trail when they headed out to search for her, so luckily that ended with only one long cold sleepless night. She ended up sleeping much of the next 2 days to recover. (We also found out that the previous night some other woman got lost and spent the night out without even a jacket).

I saw some interesting wildlife including a flock of 20 or 30 wild turkeys, some deer, lizards, a whip?snake, an immature golden eagle (I think), and I even saw a raven fold its wings and roll over in flight two or three times while making a gurgling noise... I think he was just showing off to the climbers. There were a lot of little purpleish flowers and a few other flowers were starting to bloom, although it was still a little early for most of the wildflowers I think. Things were pretty green with the recent rains although the cottonwoods didn't have any leaves yet.

Some of the rest day activities included festering in the trailers to avoid the rain, hiking up a side canyon, looking for and at petroglyphs and dinosaur footprints, taking photos, cooking and eating, reading, trying to ride Josh's unicycle, a movie, making fun of me, and heading into Canyonlands to help search for Wynn. We had one rest day that wasn't exactly planned when it went and rained a lot. The trailers were very appreciated in the evenings and during the rain. In fact they were appreciated pretty much all the time.

Part of the flock of turkeys

a lizard suns himself

Slick has more personality than most

Indian Creek is not kind to your manicure

Julie coils the rope

I wrote a little essay for the guidebook (they have pages with various bits from climbers about the Creek) my first trip to the creek

There were lots of little flowers in the meadows (Supercrack Buttress)

Indian Creek vista from the Fin wall

The day we left was super windy, so we left early rather than staying and getting blown off the cliff and potentially having to drive against a super headwind in the dark. As it was, there was a lot of blowing dust and sand on the Reservation as well as a bit of rain and a strong gusty headwind making driving less than optimal, especially with the trailer like a parachute behind us. In fact the visibility was down to about 100 meters at the worst, with a surrealistic orange tint to the haze and some flying tumbleweeds. It made the towers in Monument valley look cool, but I'd have prefered less wind and more visibility. One advantage of leaving early was that although the drive was long, we still got back at a decent hour - when fresh bread came out of the oven and dinner was ready to eat.

The drive wasn't so pleasant

orange-out on the drive through the Rez

Erik was up there with another Flagstaff crew too, he posted some pics on Cascade Climbers... the link is here

more panoramas ... The end of a long day at the creek

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