A weekend in the San Rafael Swell
In December 2020 we headed to the San Rafael Swell for some light canyoneering in Utah. This area has a reputation for wide plains that suddenly crash into a wall of stunning canyons along a mostly Southern wall. This area is unlike anywhere else in the neighboring states (though Zion’s Narrows and The Maze in Canyonlands are both in Utah).
In planning this trip, we found Road Trip Ryan’s website to be a fantastic resource for canyoneering and hiking information. We used some route information from Ryan’s post on Little Wild Horse/Bell canyons, and Ding/Dang canyons to learn more about the area. If you’re interested in trying canyoneering, check out Ryan’s website and always check the forecast for precipitation before you leave.
We put together the route below, which is pretty simple. Take the Hanksville exit from I-70 and head South until you hit Temple Mt. Road. From there, turn left onto Goblin Valley Rd for a few miles, turn right onto Wild Horse Rd, and follow it to your destination. Definitely bring a GPS navigation device to get to the canyons and walk through them. Cell service out here was little to none.
As far as camping goes, the spots in the bottom right of the image below were wide open in the middle of December, but they would likely fill up quickly during any Fall weekend. GPS coordinates for the blue dot are: 38.5791, -110.7673 (WGS84).
Our campsite was completely wide-open and VERY cold. Temperatures got down to mid 20’s (F), which meant we got to spend a lot of time inside the camper when we weren’t cooking or moving.
We started out with Little Wild Horse (LWH) and Bell canyons as a warm-up for Ding and Dang, since LWH and Bell are less technical and we had heard they were completely dry. The narrows at the beginning of LWH are very accessible – we even saw an adventurous family there with their kids.
NOTE: if you do bring your kids, be extra prepared to ensure their safety in the event of a flash flood to avoid tragic accidents such as the one that happened earlier this year. Don’t enter a slot canyon when there is any reasonable chance of precipitation within the drainage basin, but even some meteorologists who happened to be hiking LWH during this accident were caught off-guard.
The slots at the beginning of LWH are worth a visit to the Swell on their own. As you can see below, they can get pretty tight!
As we progressed into Little Wild Horse, the canyon began to open up and offer some more grand views of large walls. Once through LWH, we headed down Bell Canyon.
After completing LWH and Bell, we returned to camp for the evening to eat and warm up. Lots of warming up.
The next day we went up Ding Canyon and down Dang Canyon. Ding was completely dry, but offered some fun challenges regardless.
Some of the “keeper” potholes in Ding Canyon still had a sizable amount of water in them that looked equal parts gross and difficult to escape. Don’t fall in!
Don’t fall in!
We got through Ding and headed down Dang Canyon. Dang is manageable for the most part, but the end has some fairly technical downclimbs and wet sections that require either good downclimbing and canyoneering skills – or a short rope with knowledge of how to use it. One such section is pictured below from one of our previous visits to the area. We expected this rope to be here, but to our surprise all of the ropes had been cleaned out of the area, which made for a pretty spicy downclimb!
We encountered a few more technical downclimbs requiring some weird body positions and climbing skills. The hardest part was a section with a 13ft downclimb that ended in some water. I chose to try my hand at staying dry, while Kayla made the objectively smarter choice of wading through the water.
The tightest part of Dang came immediately after this section, but fortunately it was more fun than difficult.
And just like that, we were out of Dang canyon and back into the prairies! What a beautiful area.
We had originally planned on also running through Moonshine Wash Canyon on the following day, but there was some weather moving in, so we decided to bail and visit Canyonlands near MOAB instead. We definitely plan to come back for Moonshine Wash in the future!
We headed back to our Moab campsite, quickly packed up, and headed back home to try and beat the bad weather coming in.
It turned out that we didn’t quite beat the weather and had to spend much longer on the road than we wanted to. We ended up driving through a blizzard and nearly doubling our expected drive time. Thankful to be back in one piece, but the camper got just a liiiiitle bit dirty.
That’s it! What a great Utah adventure. If you have any questions or comments shoot us a message on Instagram!
-Colin and Kayla