ATV Adventures: Riding through sandstone canyons at the Ticaboo Rally
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- Dropping down into the beautiful Shootamaring Canyon on the Ticaboo Rally.
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- Working our way around amazing sandstone walls in Shootamaring Canyon at the Ticaboo Rally.
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- Lynn Blamires
Ticaboo is an oasis in the middle of nowhere. It is about 8 miles north of Bull Frog Marina, but it is surrounded by nothing except some of the most amazing scenery Utah has to offer.
Not only are the rooms spacious and comfortable, the amenities included make it a vacation destination. Equipment is available for rent to enjoy water activities on Lake Powell, canyoneering in the beautiful red rocks, and UTVs to enjoy the hundreds of miles of trail in this breathtaking country.
The Ticaboo Rally brought me here on the first weekend in November. The Rally was on course to have a record turnout and then the weather turned cold and registrations dropped. I am writing about what they missed.
The weather was colder than at last year’s Rally, but the first day dawned clear and the sun warmed things up pretty quickly. While it was still cool, we were dressed for the weather and the ride was great.
The ride was called “A Taste of Ticaboo.” It was 67 miles of red rock canyons and some very interesting history in the category of “Jurassic Park.”
We headed south out of the Ticaboo Lodge parking lot to go north along Shitamaring Creek. It was a wash that looked like it had seen a lot of water recently. We were following a marked trail, but it had been recently washed out.
I learned that a huge storm hit the Henry Mountains. The wash varies from half a mile to a mile wide and it had been covered with up to 14 inches of water from the run off of this storm.
My thoughts as we started this ride were about the fact that I had ridden this trail before. Do I need to make another GPS track of a trail I had already ridden? I decided to start the track anyway. As it turned out, it was a different track than the one we rode last year and I would have been disappointed not to have it in my library.
We made a stop at the Shootaring Mine where our guide, Brent, told us of some more recent history. By recent I mean about 150 years ago.
The area was visited by Father Escalante and later by John Wesley Powell. In 1869, Powell called mountains the Unknown Mountains and it wasn’t until he concluded his expedition that he named them the Henry Mountains after Joseph Henry, a friend and secretary of the Smithsonian.
The Henrys are located in the middle of the Colorado Plateau and have been described as a sea of sandstone cut by deep canyons. Little was known about them until after the Civil War when Powell ventured into this area.
Continuing our ride, we dropped down into narrow Shootamaring Canyon. This was a beautiful part of the ride, but I thought that it was not a place to be when that storm broke on the Henrys.
Climbing out of the Canyon, we wound our way through a country full of stone cathedrals and colorful cliffs. Stopping near Dial’s Knob, we scoured the ground finding fossils called “Devil’s Toe Nails.” Well, that is what they looked like. We learned that they were fossils — a bivalve oyster that had lived when the area was under water.
We passed Copper Creek and then some places with interesting names like Eggnog and Jackass Spring. We even passed Butt Canyon — how did that name come to be?
Soon we stopped at a junction with the famous Burr Trail. Josh Lively, a doctor of paleontology at the Prehistoric Museum in Price, was there. On the table were some very interesting specimens of Jurassic dinosaurs.
We listened, spellbound, as an excited Lively talked about some of his discoveries in Utah. He had a cast of a skull of a diplodocus and an actual petrified spike from a stegosaurus. He showed us raptor claws and told us about creatures that used to roam the earth.
Heading south back toward Lake Powell, we took a side trail to an overlook into Hall’s Creek Canyon. It was worth the stop to see deep down into this beautiful canyon.
Following a section of the Burr Trail, we made our way back to Ticaboo, finishing about an eight-hour ride. When you go, take plenty of water, keep the rubber side down and watch for information on the Fifth Annual Ticaboo Rally to put on your 2023 calendar.
Contact Lynn R. Blamires at quadmanone@gmail.com.