Bull Gulch
Today
I took a hike into Bull Gulch with my puppy Ronny, dodging some rain
drops but also enjoying the warm sunshine that would emerge in between
them. Bull Gulch is a 15,000 acre BLM Wilderness Study Area (WSA)
bordered by the Colorado River to the West and the Castle Peak WSA to
the east. Its namesake canyon that feeds into the Upper Colorado River
corridor just above Pinball Rapid, and though its beautiful and easily
accessible not many people are familiar with it. That’s in partly due to
the lack of signage for it, and the fact that though its plainly
visible from the road and river, it really doesn’t look like anything
special from thoses vantage point. But once one begins hiking up into
it, a very different scene appears than might be expected. The red
sandstone walls close in, and although not narrow enough to qualify as a
slot canyon, it does feel very intimate, quiet, and untrammeled.
When I first moved up here to the Colorado River over twenty years ago,
we inherited a number of excellent local maps from the previous owner
of our house. I’ve always loved perusing paper maps, and reviewing the
USGS map of the river valley I noticed that the land above our place had
not one but four different flavors of public federal land. Along the
river corridor itself is BLM, the land moving uphill into the Flat Tops
is administered by the US Forest Service. Above that is the Flat Tops
Wilderness, but along the south side of the BLM for many miles I first
noticed the Bull Gulch. It encompasses some of the most colorful red
rock country that I’ve ever seen, and I've explored a lot of Utah and
Arizona, the gold standards for colorful geology. The difference
between a federally-designated wilderness and a WSA is that the former
requires an act of Congress, and the latter is an area that has been defined
to have wilderness characteristics but lacks the real protections a
formal “wilderness” has. Pouring over my map, I looked over the dry
wash known as Bull Gulch and wondered why the entire WSA was named for
it. It wasn’t anything I had ever noticed on my previous trips down the
canyon via road or river.
So one day I decided to check it out. To get there, you have to either
take a boat, and tying up on river left at the alluvial fan near its
mouth, or park on the road and use the railroad bridge to get over to
the other side of the river. (Since crossing the railroad bridge is
technically illegal, I can’t recommend that method of getting there, but
it is quicker and way less complicated). The first time I went I did it
as part of a river trip, and the first couple of hundred feet into the
canyon I couldn’t understand why, with all of the other natural wonders
found in the area, the WSA would be named for this underwhelming dry
wash. But then I rounded a corner and understood. There was a spot one
has to climb up through to get up into the rest of the canyon, worn
smooth as a tea kettle spout by eons of intermittent flash floods.
Climbing up through it isn’t technical, but requires all of one’s hands
and feet to do. It’s a little bit of a scramble.
After a big flood a couple of years ago, and large curved log washed down to the spout and got caught just above the spout, forming an arch. Once through the spout, you find yourself in a spectacular narrow canyon with vivid red
sandstone on either side. Venturing further up, the dirt floor
transitions to smooth green granite, which only enhances the red walls
by contrast. The really pretty part of the canyon isn’t long, perhaps
only a half-mile, but what a half mile it is. Continuing on up, the
trail eventually flattens a bit, the surrounding walls open up, and soon
you are hiking up a normal wash as can be found in remote places all
over the southwest. But even though its not long, it is striking enough
that it’s a worthy namesake to the public lands it’s a part of.
Over the years, I’ve hiked up into Bull Gulch many times. When I do
scenic river floats, I’ll usually offer to show it to people who are
physically able to clamber through the two tricky spots that must be
navigated to get in there. The first is the water spout at the bottom,
and the second a steep, narrow trail that bypasses a cliff which is a
little too high to overcome without some technical gear. Most people
who see it are as impressed with it as I am. One thing that I’ve learned
about Bull Gulch is that in the middle of summer, it can be somewhat
like an oven, as the sun’s heat tends to radiate from the walls and
ground. There also tends to be very little breeze to cool things off.
Its a dry wash most of the time, until its not. It drains a pretty
large area, so when it rains hard it can blow out and scour the walls
pretty high. Bull Gulch can flash flood quickly, and turn the entire
Colorado River as red as its sandstone walls, often rendering the river
unfishable for a couple of days until the wash becomes dry once more.
Its a good place to hike with a dog, since the steep walls prevent them
from running off after some interesting scent or wild critter. Also,
I've never seen anyone else in there hiking, so the odds of meeting
someone else doing the same thing is next to nil.
After running river shuttles today that ended down at my shop, I had to
bring a couple of my drivers back up to Derby Junction. I stopped by
my house to pick up Ronny, thinking that on my way back we could do a
short Bull Gulch hike. Ronny is a perfect little black lab bitch whom I
refer to as a “mini-lab”, since she was the runt of her litter. Being
an English Lab, none of her other littermates are big, but Ronny is only
three-quarters of their size. For some reason I love Ronny as much as
any dog I’ve ever had, and for some reason she seems to love me a lot back.
On the way back from Derby Junction, it began to rain very hard, and I
thought that we’d have to do something else. A front was supposed to
come through in the afternoon, and I assumed that this was it. But then
the rain stopped as quickly as it started, and the sun came back out. I
decided to go for it, and grabbed a rain shell just int case. We
parked near the bridge and used the non-raft alternative to get up in
there. Using the rail bridges is something I do often, especially
between my home and shop, but I never take them for granted. Two of them
have short sightlines, especially to the north, and since the
prevailing winds seem to usually come from the south, there is often
very little notice given by southbound trains. When the wind is blowing
hard from the south, trains can sometimes be heard from fifteen miles
away, after they make the turn north at Dotsero and begin the trek up
the Colorado River valley. But the southbound trains can suddenly just
…appear. Once not long after we moved here, my wife and I were using
the tracks to go from our property to my in-laws, which is a mile and
half downriver via car or boat, but only a half mile along the train
tracks. As we got the first bridge, we debated whether to cross and
wondered whether or not it would be safe to do so. I decided to try the
technique used by Indians in Hollywood movies, and crouched down to put
my ear to the rail to listen. Immediately above the bridge is a narrow
gap cut into the hillside by the rail line, and the moment my ear
touched that rail that gap was suddenly filled by an enormous yellow Rio
Grande locomotive booming towards me. Not wanting to have my head
flattened like a penny, I flung myself away from the tracks as my wife
and I watched the big train roar past. So much for Hollywood. Now
whenever I cross any of the bridges, I run or jog, always expecting one
of those trains to materialize at any moment. I've also learned to read the signal lights.
When Ronny and I crossed, the wind was blowing hard from the south and
there would be very little notice of anything coming the other way, so
we ran quickly. Once across, I knew that there was no fresh water in
Bull Gulch, so we bushwhacked through the brush to get down to the
river’s edge, where Ronny had a quick swim and drink. From there, we
headed back up to the tracks and into Bull Gulch, which is only a couple
hundred feet from the bridge. Once we began our hike, Ronny went
straight into happy dog mode, zigging and zagging and experiencing her
new world through her nose. We got the water spout, and after I climbed
up she came right behind me without difficulty. She also got through
the narrow trail around the cliff easier than I did by engaging her Four
Paw Drive. After a few more cold rain drops, the sun came out for real
and we walked and walked, past the narrow cliffs and up into the sage
and pinion pines above. Eventually we turned and walked back, and when
we got to the section where the green granite floor was I decided to
just lay down on it and enjoy the feel of the warm sun on my face.
Making a pillow of my rain shell, I lay there watching the fluffy
Simpsons clouds speed past set off by the deep blue sky, and took off my
shirt, so that the sun could take the edge off my pasty white winter
chest. I began to think about the concept of “grounding”, which involves
touching your body to the earth, and alleged health benefits that can
reap. That can mean something as simple as just walking barefoot, or
laying down in the grass. With my shirt off I could feel the smooth
warm rock at my back, and I kept my arms on it as well with my hands
flat to the granite. It occurred to me that the more of my bare flesh
that was touching the better, and so I unbuckled my belt and pulled my
pants down to my ankles, so that my butt and legs were now “grounded” as
well. I’m not sure whether there were any physiological benefits to
doing this, but it definitely made me brain feel good. Ronny looked at
me in a puzzled way, and it occurred to me that dogs are usually
grounded all of the time.
I did think that if anyone happened along, my laying almost naked out
in the middle of a public canyon might be taken in various ways, not all
of them positive. But I also knew that the odds of anyone else being
up in here was about .00001%, and so decided that it was worth the risk.
Just in case, I put my baseball cap over my wedding tackle. Ronny got
tired of sniffing and lay down beside me, and seemed to enjoy this new
game too, though she seems to enjoy just about everything. We both lay
there for what seemed like a long time, until I felt a couple of stray
rain drops land on me, which combined with the still warm sunshine made
for an invigorating juxtaposition.
Then a big cloud passed over, and it was time to pull up my pants and
get back down the canyon. Bull Gulch would not be a good place to be in
a flash flood, and even though it wasn’t raining much overhead didn’t
mean that it wasn’t doing further up the canyon. If a wall of water
suddenly appeared, scaling the steep walls would not have been an easy
or quick option. Ronny did just fine on the steep trail section, but
when we got the waterspout she refused to go down, and so we had to go
around on a faint game trail she was much happier with.
Near the mouth of the canyon we could hear the roar of the river, which
is in the early stages of runoff. Soon we were sprinting across the
bridge, and back in the car for the short ride home. I feel
indescribably lucky to live in such a beautiful place, with the river
and mountains and red rock canyons so close at hand. For many years I
lived on the Front Range of Colorado and thought that natural wonders
were close by, but over the years as more and more people like me moved
to the Centennial State to seek out these outdoor opportunities, the
traffic one endures to get to places like this offsets any psychological
benefits one derives from finally getting there. Bull Gulch is one of
those special places there are many of in Colorado, and one I don’t mind
sharing with others, since the odds of us crossing paths here is
minimal. But just remember that if you ever do make the journey here
and come across a nearly naked man along the way, its not anything
weird, he’s probably just getting a little closer to Mother Earth.
Jack Bombardier
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