from $995* per person	7 Days	April
Comfort accommodations		Exertion level: 3
Operator: Sierra Club Outings		12 people max

"On her haunches and behind her, toward the north, is where the girdling slopes jag off into one enormous oblong; an Olympian commingling of terrifying sheer drops and distorted upheavals and all manner of cavernous holes and corridors -- perhaps the roughest, wildest, most disordered conglomeration in a territory which nowhere and never is what you would exactly call docile." -- Irvin S. Cobb, Arizona Highways magazine, 1940

Early in the 20th century, the well known southwestern desert guide John Wetherill led various adventurers -- including author Zane Grey, clothing manufacturer Charles Bernheimer, and former president Teddy Roosevelt -- through Cobb's "disordered conglomeration" on the way to Rainbow Bridge. Zane Grey later described the route as having the most dangerous slopes he had ever seen. Roosevelt described tilted masses of sheet-rock ending in cliffs and difficult for both horses and men. Bernheimer, describing the route as "fiendish," wrote to his wife that there was nothing like it anywhere else.

We will hike to Rainbow Bridge and walk in the shadow of Navajo Mountain, but we won’t follow John Wetherill’s route. That route, known as the Rainbow Trail, is today traveled by possibly a hundred hikers every year. Our route is followed by no one. In comparison, it will make Wetherill's look as flat as Kansas.

The trip will begin in Rainbow City on the east flank of Navajo Mountain. After starting on Wetherill's now well worn route, we will leave that route for the maze of cracks and slot canyons identified on early maps as Mystery Canyon. From this point on, our route is cross-country through a tortuous landscape that to this day has known very few non-native visitors.

Mystery Canyon is well protected from casual hikers. Its Colorado River terminus is a long blank wall. At its upper end, the canyon's three branches embrace a nearly 2,000-foot high sandstone battlement -- which history contains no record of having been climbed or crossed. All three branches are narrow, vertical slots with no easy, or easily found, routes in or out.

Our hike will take us into all three branches. All are relatively short and were it not for the pour-offs, plunge pools, ledges, cliffs and, in some places, nearly impenetrable vegetation, a motivated hiker could walk the length of each branch in a day. But the obstacles make this impossible without technical canyoneering skills and very nearly impossible even with them. We will backpack across the three branches of the canyon and day-hike in each of the branches where we can safely do so. We will see Anasazi ruins, moqui steps, pictographs, petroglyphs, a cave, a dinosaur, miles of slickrock and more vertical landscape per square yard than perhaps anywhere in the southwest.

Our last day begins with a short hike to Echo Camp -- now just a few rusting bed frames and disintegrating wood shacks, but graced with a lovely spring and a shallow pool surrounded by maidenhair fern. Soon thereafter, we reach Rainbow Bridge, the destination for John Wetherill’s trips and the highest and longest natural stone bridge on the planet. The trip ends with a leisurely boat ride across Lake Powell back to Page.