Backpacking the Maze District in Canyonlands National Park

After slinging my water-heavy backpack onto my shoulders and convincing myself I had everything I would need for the week, I shut the passenger door of the dirty blue Chevy pickup. Almost in slow motion, the fruit punch Gatorade sitting on the red-dusted floor mat caught my eye as the door swung shut.

I wonder if it will get roasted by the afternoon sun while we’re gone, I thought.

Three days later it was me, walking west into the afternoon sun, roasting like a Thanksgiving turkey. It was early April, but the high desert sun already had temperatures soaring into the upper 80s, and the grind across Elaterite Basin featured a fully-exposed road walk on a dusty track that hell surely took as an inspiration.

Every movie I’d ever seen featuring a hapless sack lost in the desert wading deliriously through sand and wind towards a nebulous endpoint replayed in my head.

What the living hell am I doing out here?

Is there even a Gatorade of any temperature waiting for me at the car? Was that a mirage all along?

This was the spring of 2018, and I had been to Canyonlands National Park before. I had camped there, hiked there, and entered both the Needles and Island in the Sky sections of the barren parkland. I had spent countless hours of my life hiking elsewhere, and had backpacked for overnights (and multi-night trips) on countless occasions. This, though, was the first big trip I’d attempted to bite off – what was set to be a 6-night trip in to the hard-to-reach Maze District and the deepest depths Canyonlands had to offer.

My old buddy and hiking partner George had planned the trip, with the Harvest Scene pictographs, The Plug, Lizard Rock, Chimney Rock, and the Chocolate Drops all on our list of things to see. We were set to enter via North Point in bordering Glen Canyon National Recreation Area along the North Trail, a route decision that doled out a mandatory 12-mile walk in and walk out from the Maze Overlook before we ever actually did any hiking within the Maze itself.

As it turned out, that 12-mile hellwalk on Day 1 altered our plans significantly. What it really did, unfortunately, was alter my left knee’s ability to function properly, and by the time we reached the Maze Overlook and our several hundred foot descent to the bottom of the inner canyon walls, it was already barking at me in a way I’d not experienced ever before.

The mind games of desert and canyon hiking are endless. Water, for one, becomes the most sought-after prize, and the Maze offers up precious little of it – especially on its western edge. Its eastern edge is quite literally the Green River as it flows into the Colorado River and its muddy vein of life, but the presence of (and dependability of) water elsewhere is extremely hit or miss, with most all of the drainages dry for most of the year (even as early as April). So while my knee was hurting and dropping into a canyon to end Day 1 didn’t seem like the wisest idea in a vacuum, I knew that the only source of water we’d come across since walking away from the truck that morning meandered in the softest of trickles at the bottom of that final wall.

Was my knee going to hurt worse in the morning? Probably.

Was I making any attempt to get back to the car even more difficult by dropping in? Most certainly.

Was it still the wise decision given that’s where the water was? Absolutely.

Mind game #2 came in the form of canyon camping as a premise. Back home in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the ‘average’ day of hiking comes in the form of driving up a rocky road to a trailhead, at which point you’ll ditch the car and continue gaining elevation on-foot to your destination, be it a mountain top or viewpoint or highland park. If you get hurt at any point along the way, well, gravity is at least there to assist your exit, and you know you can limp your way back downhill so long as your injury isn’t grave. Walled-in at the base of a canyon’s inner cliffs, though, means you get to climb your way out just to get home. The hardest part – going up – is the last thing you have to do all trip.

I had enough food for a week and, in theory, could rest up and recuperate where the wet stuff was even if that meant bailing on the day-hiking around the Maze that we had planned. While I didn’t know exactly what I’d done to my knee, it wasn’t going to kill me, and the reluctance to turn around and hike right back out had more to do with the knowledge of how miserable the walk was than it did a fear of my inability to pull it off. So, we pitched our tent on a sandy flat under a cottonwood tree and watched the sun bounce off the Chocolate Drops as it set behind us to the west.

It was at that point that I realized that my air mattress had popped on the descent into the Maze. It had rubbed just hard enough against the sandstone walls while rolled up under my backpack and opened up a seam. For as long as I would be holed up in the Maze, I’d be doing so while sleeping with the sand as my mattress.

There is no secret to how the Maze got its name. It’s a twisted, winding gnarl of tight-walled canyons, ancient drainages that eroded over time thanks to snowmelt from the higher elevations of Mount Pennell and the Henry Mountains looking to find its way down to the Colorado River. Everything is a river of sand now, and each ‘main’ canyon has infinite side canyons with their own closely-held secrets. Getting lost and turned around down there is an incredibly easy task, which makes knowing the ancient Anasazi people lived (and thrived) here and in neighboring canyons all the more remarkable.

When I woke on Day 2, my knee was uncomfortable. It wasn’t throbbing, and it wasn’t completely unstable, but bending it at all felt like a nearly impossible task. It wasn’t that it hurt the more I tried to bend it, it’s that the tendons and ligaments and muscles around the knee seemed to be actively preventing me from bending it at all. With the ability of hindsight I can say it would have been obvious that it was IT band syndrome, but at the time I’d never had it before. It’s fortunately not debilitating nor structural, but it sure had a way of both pissing me off and making an already difficult scenario that much more so. Thankfully, the sand had stayed warm enough that the airless air mattress didn’t impact how much my completely exhausted body slept.

It would be a roughly 14-mile round trip to see Lizard Rock, and probably a dozen or so round trip to see Chimney Rock. While it was all flat – we’d be walking along the bottom of the canyon for anything we visited – those seemed unreachable in my condition. The Harvest Scene and Pictograph Fork, though, would only require 3-3.5 miles of walking round trip, and even though the sandy walking was taxing more than I’d care to admit, the pictographs were the main reason I busted my butt to get to this remote location in the first place.

Knee be damned, I was not going to miss out on those.

Smarter and more thorough examination of the Harvest Scene and other pictographs within Canyonlands has been done by numerous other folks, and I will freely admit to being nothing more than an interested one-time observer of rock art. It’s mesmerizing, it’s huge, and odds are that most of the pictographs have been there for millenia. That’s the thing, though – nobody really knows who drew them, or how many people drew them, or whether or not more people came by and added to them periodically over time. It’s one big mystery – a 100 foot long stretch of rock (that’s perched dozens of feet up the wall) depicting various harvest-adjacent images of a bygone era.

We turned first north, then east into a canyon pocket for about a half mile before turning back south into the canyon that held the Harvest Scene. It paralleled Horse Canyon where we’d set up (and left behind) camp, our route meandering through water-carved walls surrounding the Chocolate Drops.

We sat there for several hours, feasting on our own peanut butter and rehydrated harvest, doing our amateur best to decipher what was going on in the scene. Are those figures being thrown over the canyon walls to their doom? Or are they flying up from the canyon floor? Are we flying? What the hell are we doing here, anyway?

As the heat of the afternoon wore on, the early morning breeze died off and the bugs, my god the bugs, they came out hunting. We decided to get a move on back towards Horse Canyon and our camp, with my half-legged intentions being to dive into my tent and and get off my feet and out of the swarm. George had larger intentions to further explore the depths of Horse Canyon for the rest of the afternoon, meaning I’d have the peace, quiet, and solitude in camp to further reevaluate my existence.

The two overriding thoughts I had were parallel. The walk out from our camp was long enough that by the time we reached the car, we’d be car-camping somewhere before heading out on the 8+ hour drive back home. In other words, from the moment I made the call that it was time I started limping out, it would be almost two days before getting back home to begin figuring out what I’d done to myself – and two more nights of trying to sleep on a busted pad. On top of that, we’d checked the biggest box off my Maze bucket list the first full day we’d spent at the bottom, and I had the distinct feeling that’s all I had in me to accomplish in that state.

I figured it would piss off George for at least a little bit, but it was becoming inevitable. Tomorrow I was going to pull the plug on the trip early, and good backpacking partner code meant he was going to hike out with me. I spilled the beans to him when he got back from exploring more of Horse Canyon, and I’m pretty sure the gnats and flies helped me convince him that vacating the premises in the morning was the prudent thing to do.

The base elevation of the Maze sits somewhere in the range of 4,700 feet above sea level. The walls enclosing it are roughly 300-400 feet tall, and climbing up and over them is easiest done at the Maze Overlook by following several weak points in the rock and several somewhat sketchy moki steps. If you’re hiking with a partner, it certainly adds to the ease of exit to bring with you some light rope to help tie-up and pass backpacks, since some of the more technical sections are a lot easier to pull off without the added weight on your back.

You may also recall that I previously mentioned that the only source of water we found on Day 1 was at the base of the Maze Overlook very near to where we eventually camped. That meant that for our exit, we’d be hauling out packs that were loaded with all the water we could carry for the 12-mile grind back to the car. That’s a lot of weight that we didn’t have with us on the initial descent, and keep in mind we still were carrying roughly 4-days worth of food that we had not yet consumed.

While the pack is heavy, the climbing is technical, and you’re as stiff as you’ll be all day after the long, dark night on the sand, the reality as that knocking out that section is one of the easier things you’ll do all day. Once you reach the top, you’re back on the vast Elaterite Basin, a mostly flat section of brush and dust on which you’ll walk a 4×4 road for some 6.5 miles as the sun rises and begins to bake you to a crisp.

It was at that point where I’d begin to find out just how much my leg had in it that day. The short walk from camp to the base of the Overlook was on soft sand, and the climb tested it in much different ways than finding third gear on a flat walk. It was sore and stiff and my initial gait felt akin to a car trying to drive on square tires, but as the heart rate rose and the blood began to flow, I began to feel increasingly confident that it would get me to the base of those upper canyon walls in a reasonable amount of time.

Getting up the walls would be an entirely different story, both due to how much of a pain in the ass knee stepping up was and due to the break in the early clouds that let the sun beat down on us like we were ants under a magnifying glass. On top of that, the intial section of the North Trail heading west into Glen Canyon was more soft sand, the kind that not only saps your calves and energy after a long day but also absorbs and radiates all that heat right back at ya.

We had left the truck at a pulloff near North Point along Roost Road, a rough and tumble dirt track that gets you most of the way across Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and past the Hans Flat Ranger Station (where we had picked up our permit upon entering). A quick check of the map shows the elevation of the road atop the bluff to be somewhere in the vicinity of 6,250 feet above sea level, meaning the gradual climb up to the base of the walls and then along the cracks and crags to their top would require us to gain some 1,250 feet to finish.

We pushed hard because we wanted no further minute of exposure in that sun. As we pushed hard, we began rifling through our water reserves, cognizant that we were both sweating profusely and shedding additional weight as we rehydrated. The gamble, of course, was that we’d use it all up too early in the day and be stuck waterless for the final mile and a half of road-walking once we reached the top, an area that would be the hottest and most exposed section of our day.

That’s when my mind wandered back to the fruit punch Gatorade. If it was there, it was our lifeline (though we also had the opportunity to drive the ~20 minutes back to the Ranger Station and fill up water jugs, too). From a mental perspective, though, the final hour we spent scrambling our way out of the canyon became a race not to get back to the car, but a race to get to some sweet, sweet fluids.

George ran out of water first. When he did, I had about a half-liter that had been in my side pocket all day, meaning it was hotter than bath water. That’s what we split to get ourselves to the top of the canyon walls, and we cashed that as we limped down the rock/dirt road back to the car.

Sure enough, the Gatorade was sitting right where I’d last seen it on the floorboard of the passenger seat, directly in the laser-eye of the sun. It was the best thing I think I’ve ever had to drink.

If You Go…

• Don’t.
• I’m kidding, but maybe don’t. The hike into and out of the maze from North Point is a waterless abyss that’s 100% exposed to the sun with no break, and that’s vital to factor into your calculations. That said, if you’ve got access to a true 4×4 vehicle (and not just a stock issue car with 4-wheel drive), you can drive all the way to the Maze Overlook. Doing so just might save your legs enough to allow you to enjoy the bottom of the Maze better than I did in this trip.
• Trails Illustrated #312 (Maze District, Canyonlands National Park) served as an excellent map and resource for this trip.
• Backpacking and staying within the Maze (and Canyonlands NP) requires a permit, and they are issued on a limited basis. Camping within the Maze is zone-specific (meaning there are not named and designated sites), and those zones are where they are due to the presence of the limited spring water available.
• George, to his credit, made a return trip to the Maze in early April of 2021. He documented it (as well as many of his other trips) on his YouTube channel ‘GeorgeBackpacking.’ Give him a follow, if you will! (For the record, he invited me on that return trip, which I declined to accept given that my wife had given birth to our first child in late January of 2021. I’m lying…I declined because the Maze completely kicked my ass, and I was in no shape to try to tame it at that point.)