Backpacking Mineral Gulch

For Christmas, I got Michael a Backpack from Cabella's. Then for his birthday (which happened to be the same day as the REI anniversary sale), I got him a sleeping bag, a camping stove, two thermarest pads (ok, one was for me), a tent, and some camping cookware. At this point he was all set for a backpacking adventure.

Last Monday evening, we did a little online research on backpacking destinations, and we headed out for Mineral Gulch on Tuesday morning. Mineral Gulch is just East of Zion National Park. We started hiking in the afternoon and set up camp about 7.5 miles later. After we had pitched our tent, I reached into my pack to get out my fleece. It was soaked. Turns out that the valve of my 3 liter camel back pouch somehow popped open while we were setting up camp. All of my warm clothes were soaked and I had lost about 3/4 of the water I had brought to sustain my life for the next 2 days. Luckily, we had brought some emergency water purifier tablets along and there was some water about a mile away. So the next morning, we woke up and started walking to find the Indian Pictographs that we had hiked down here to see. We walked about two miles out to a really beautiful section of narrows when we figured out that we had missed the confluence that we were supposed to turn at. So we went back to camp, ate lunch, packed up, and started backtracking yesterday's trail. We found the confluence about 1.5 miles away. We had totally missed it the day before. At this point, we filled a bottle of water to treat, ditched our packs, and headed up the wash in search of the pictographs.

We never found the pictographs. We did find 7-arch, though, at the end of the trail where these pictographs supposedly were. We searched and searched for the pictographs, bushwhacking along the base of the cliffs, to no avail.

We decided to hike a few miles back toward the trail head and set up camp for one last night before heading home. A couple of miles later, we ran out of regular water and were forced to drink the emergency purified water. It was so gross that it made us dry-heave. We decided that we would rather hike extra miles that night than drink that nasty water for another day. So after about 18 miles of hiking (7.5 with 50 lb. packs on our backs), we finally reached our car. We were both so exhausted and dehydrated. We headed straight for the nearest gas station and immediately drank $6 worth of Gatorade. We also checked into the nearest hotel when we determined that our legs hurt too much to drive for 4 hours.

We had a great time, but it would have been a lot better if I would not have lost my water.