Everyone of the 60 plus people surrounding me is either headed to or coming from Lake Powell; you can tell which by the shade of their sun burn. You can also tell that I am the odd one out by simply looking at the parking lot: a heat haze of large to superhuge trucks pulling trailers loaded with large to superhuge boats, practically incandescent they are so new and clean. Then there is “Snorry,” a little starting-to-rust-truck so red with dust you can barely tell that if we were ever to wash her (we won’t), she would be white. I describe this little beast with a certain amount of pride and ill-disguised snobbery. This truck has been down so many gnarly, sandy, rutted, pitted, boulder-strewn roads you can read her adventures like brail across her body (where has your truck been, huh? huh?). This also means you can read adventure in the stacks of receipts from various autobody shops that Adam keeps in a shoebox in the back seat. He curses “Snorry” monthly but I, free from the hassle of actually having to pay for her up-keep, unabashedly love her. 
Just this morning, her four-wheel-drive superpowers, facilitated by her short wheelbase allowed me to wake up in a mostly-used-by-cows meadow, perched high on Boulder Mountain and miles from any town or campground. Laying in her bed in my sleeping bag, mosquito netting over my head, watching the light come on slowly across the white bark of the aspen next to me, I felt grateful that I did not have to sleep on the ground with all those cow flops. ************************************
We are in Hanksville. And as Adam put it when we were driving into town, Hanksville is just a collision of heat, and dry and wind. This condition, as far as I can tell, is only going to get worse. Back in 20
06, the entire region suffered 100 year floods. I say “suffered”, but I think they were
awesome. Slot canyons with barely enough water in them to constitute calling it “moisture,” saw water levels rise to some 20, and in some cases 60, feet. Hiking down Coyote Gulch, you can still see flood debris in the tops of mature cottonwoods. A whole section a Hole-In-the-Rock road was washed away across the pinon/juniper plains at the foot of the Straight Cliffs, carrying with it a 100 year old line shack and Hanksville was flooded beyond recognition by the rising flume of the Fremont/Dirty Devil River.
Flooding, as far as I can see, could only have improved this sorry little town. Since then, the city has set out to squelch any possible threat from that nasty nasty river and, with what I can only call Rooseveltian enthusiasm for using our natural resources by lassoing them and pining them to the ground, has decided to drive the devil underground. Now, what little green relief the eye could have found in this otherwise greyish-brown and brownish-grey blight is slowly dying off. The river bed has a few scattered pools, stagnant and mucky. So much for shade.
And today, we could have used shade. Outside, it is 110 degrees so we are seeking re
lief in ice cream. Stan’s Burger Shak was first opened by Stan Alvey in 1985 and is now run by his kids. The
Alveys have been living in this area since its foundation, there is a prominent wash named after them just over the mountain in Escalante. I have been to Stan’s some 5 or 6 times, but never during the height of summer. Usually an explosion of customers resulting in a line out the door and a room full of screaming kids does not improve the quality of food and service at a restaurant, but Stan’s seems to be thriving on it. I comment on the crowdedness of the room to the cashier and she just smiles and says, “Yah, its fun.” For a minute I’m incredulous, but then again, I’ve seen this town during the rest of the year and I don’t imagine she has much to do when all these people aren’t here demanding huge shakes and burgers.
I’m usually here in October or March, the two months when I can pull my dad awa
y from the endless hordes of patients who believe that he is the only doctor who can save their lives (maybe he is). A few years ago, after trying to plan a succession of backpacking trips with friends, all of which failed due to my friends’—you know who you are, I love you all—general flakiness, I decided to turn to a partner I could rely on. A partner who, when I mentioned I was planning a backpacking trip into Dark Canyon, could barely disguise the wolfish gleam in his eye and who immediately went out and spent four hundred dollars on camp stoves, pocket knives, sleeping bags, heavy duty plastic eating utensils with a fork at one end and a spoon at the other, hiking boots, a tiny flash light, and a tiny water pump that worked perfectly for the first day of our trip. My
dad. My dad, who filled my head as a kid with stories of mountains and horses and back country canoe trips. Who, all growing up read Louis L’amore novels, who lovingly (and mistakenly) took my Seattle bred mom to a cabin in the woods (with the promise that he would take her to Europe within the first few years of their marriage) for their honeymoon, who used to hike up the back of Timp just to study, and who, miraculously, had never been backpacking until three years ago when I took him. (I took my sister, her husband, my mom and my brothers too…all nubies. Man, I love you all and man, am I never doing that again).
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For the last two Spring Breaks (March) my dad and I have descended the 1,600 foot— elevation lost in 1 mile—rockslide known alternately as “The Sundance Trail” and “The Devil’s Staircase” to collapse happily stream side in the rarely visited (there’s a reason for the colorful epithet) deeps of Dark Canyon. I’m not sure how much to give away here. On one hand: Holy Shit! On the other hand, I don’t really want you all to be there the next time I go. However…
Dark Canyon begins up by the Bear’s Ears in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. The canyon is a wilderness area within the jurisdiction of both the National Forest (top) and the BLM (bottom), having received its wilderness designation as a result of the Wilderness Act of 1984 thanks to well know nature lover, your best tree-huggin’ friend and mine, Ronald Reagan. The canyon runs 30 miles, falling 5,000 feet in elevation from pinion and juniper plateaus, to lush riparian oases and finally to the Colorado River (or at least, the backwash that is now Lake Powell). The miles of descent are broken by a series of waterfalls (sometimes hard to navigate), plunging you deeper and deeper into the many layered bottoms.
The Sundance Trail drops you about ten miles from where Dark Canyon intersects Cataract Canyon. The trailhead is ridiculously hard to find, but only because all of the helpful guidebook directions to the trailhead (Allen, Kelsey, etc) are wrong. Luckily, the Utah Road & Recreation Atlas is surprisingly easy to follow, has the correct numbers for all the little dirt roads leading to the trailhead, and positions the trailhead in the correct location on the map. Glen Canyon Rec has recently relocated the trailhead and it’s easy to see why. The trail used to begin by a muddy, shitty, mire, aka a cow trough. And now begins on a smooth slickrock shelf from which you can look down and down and down into Dark Canyon.
We first went in to Dark with Adam in March of ’09. We began our hike early. Des
cent of the rockslide puts you in full sun with no shade and no water so we ran like hell to get down to the stream before noon. The rockslide, however does not lend itself to anything like running. I think I may have laughed, sort of deliriously, when I fist caught sight of the slide from across canyon. From a distance, it doesn’t look at all traversable. It looks like a huge, precarious mess and you can’t help but wonder if the weathered impulse that initiated this slide however many years ago, might just decide to finish the job and drop the rest of the wall on you as you descend. Why shouldn’t it? We, however, made it alive, and I have to confess to loving this rockslide. It makes entry into the canyon a sort of test of will, an ordeal in the medieval sense, an adventure.
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At first arrival, I have to admit to being disappointed. I had been used to pack trips in the intimate country of the Escalante, sweeping walls thrumming in the heat, writhing movement in the rock stilled and still obvious in patterns of cross-bedding. This canyon, on the other hand was wide. Steve Allen’s route description and various travel blogs I’d read had promised pools and falls and this was just rocky and rather brown. Dark Canyon has been called the “Little Grand canyon.” Yes, it was a very deep canyon, but otherwise I was unimpressed.
Luckily the canyon redeemed itself next day. After a short meander down stream, the brushy and cobble filled creek smoothed out over a brown bottom. Brown then gave away to grey as the watercourse narrowed and widened into teardrop shaped pools, deep enough for the f
irst plunge of the year. In observation of my dad’s comfort level, I swam at first in my clothes but swimming in pool after pool after deep sinewy pool I couldn’t take it any more and he and Adam hightailed it down canyon to find a “boys hole.”
The canyon bottom progressed steadily downward, dropping dramatically 100 feet into a slick, gray narrow. As we traversed around the fall, peering down into the dark, we could not see the bottom. From our ledge, Adam trundled large rocks into the stream. They fell a long way and made a satisfying splash. This water was deep.
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Next day, we wandered up stream, discovering a veritable waterpark of slicks, slides, pools and falls created by my new favorite rock layer, the Hermosa Formation. The Hermosa is made of creamy purple limestone, forming smooth sidewalks at the base of an otherwise orange and blocky sandstone canyon. These sidewalks are scattered here and there with flood debris, but are otherwise clear, rippling slightly and dropping delightfully and allofthesudden into narrow little watercourses. The first time we observed this phenomena, I literally jumped for joy and ran for the first deep pool. The second day followed this pattern: walk a bit, squeal, plunge, walk a bit more, squeal, plunge. We didn’t get very far.
In March the canyon is just starting to come alive. When we first arrived, the Cottonwood trees lining parts of the creek had tightly curled leaf balls on the end of each slender branch. By the third day, the leaves uncurled and you could see the occasional Aster poking out of clefts in the rock. On our first visit in ‘09, we wandered hot in the sun (hot to us, it was probably no more that 70). In March of 2010, we decided to return and explore further up canyon. Our October pack trip had been spent in the dry dry dry outposts of Grand Gulch where we had searched anxiously for water and were saved by a very green and notatall fresh pothole. My Camelback water bladder has never fully recovered. In the spring, we were eager to return to a canyon with the promise of soaks and swims and no stress over drinking water. On our second visit to Dark, clouds kept interrupting our progress and day time temperatures warmed to no more than 60. We swam anyway.
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On our way home from each of these trips; Dark Canyon I, Grand Gulch, and Dark Canyon II, my dad and I stopped at Stan’s. Charmingly, my dad blends the name of the town and the restaurant in his memory, so Stan’s to him (and therefore to me) is always, “Hank’s.” There is no amount of food that we could have eaten while backpacking that could possibly have given us the calories needed to hike up that rockslide, so we arrived starving. This can only have helped the food because, In October and March, Stan’s is dead. The only exceptions are a couple of dirty boys with rafts strapped to their car and the cashier’s friend, clearly a local, who stands chatting with her for the entirety of our visit. My dad and I play Mille Bornes while we wait for our food, watching the counter hungrily for any sign of a fry.
In October and March, the cook stands listlessly staring out windows, compulsively checking his cell phone for texts and the shakemaker (proper title for one who makes shakes?) puts hardly any thin, stringy pineapple into my roughly blended shake. They are out of tomatoes. The buns are stale. There simply is no juice to life, and certainly none in the food. The cook must be so morose over this lackluster season, that he can’t be bothered to watch my burger as it cooks because it is unforgivable dry. We eat everything and leave no crumbs.
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Sitting here
in July, I forgive Stan’s it’s off-season mediocrity. Adam and I have been swimming in Capital Reef all afternoon—the waterfall off Highway 24—and water always makes me hungry. At Stan’s, everyone is spoiled by being served dessert first—easier and quicker to make. In front of me is the most enormous shake I have ever had and it is chalk full of blackberries, cheesecake and bits of graham cracker crust. Adam orders an Oreo shake, but keeps sneaking his spoon into mine. I have tried mango shakes, raspberry-banana, caramel and pineapple here at Stan’s and this one is the clear winner (make note: when you come, you
must order the BLACKBERRY CHEESECAKE SHAKE). When we have waited for the sun-burnt hordes to be served, our order is finally ready. The bun is glistening with brushed-on oil, it is plump and buttery. The patty is thick and juicy, the tomato is there! and the fries are crispy! The “on-season” is clearly in full swing. After all that ice cream, I’m not even sure I can eat this, but hell, I’ll give it a shot.
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I want to dedicate this post specificaly to my dad in hopes that we will go on many more adventures together!
A little bit of useful info...
Region: South Eastern Utah
Contact Info:
160 S Highway 95, Hanksville, UT 84734
(435) 542-3330
Rating (out of 5):
On-season:
Burger ☼☼1/2 Fries ☼☼ Shake (get the Blackberry Cheesecake) ☼☼☼☼
Off-season:
Burger ☼ 1/2 Fries ☼☼ Shake ☼ ☼☼ (depending on flavor)
You may want to visit Stan's if you are:
* Playing in Capital Reef
*Riding ATV's around the sand hills of Hanksville and Caineville
* Visiting Factory Butte
* Running Cataract Canyon (or if your lucky, the Dirty Devil River)
* Backpacking in the Maze district of Canyonlands
* Swimming, boating, water-skiing, jet-skiing, drinkin' beer, etc on a house boat in Lake Powell (or "REservoir Fowell...)
* Climbing in the Swell or the Henry Mountains
* Visiting Goblin Valley
* Canyoneering around the Moroni Slopes or North Wash
* Hunting bison in the Henry Mountains
* On your way home from Dark Canyon!
add this too, to my tally. Without it, I would feel incomplete. A niggling sense of work not done, a dusty corner left unclean, knowing you hadn’t moved the bed to sweep under it even when you cleaned the rest of the room. I also feel that by cataloging the many local burger spots Utah has to its credit, I am offering a sort of service to fellow travelers. So it only makes sense that in order to provide my reader with really quality dining advice, I warn them off places that might leave them at the least disappointed and at the most (depending on just how badly you needed that burger and ice cream), suffering disaster. I do not however, even in my desire to be comprehensive, want to dwell on the negative. This will be brief. Here it is, my first real warning:
d I are nothing if not champion eaters. Although our friendship is by no means reducible to a shared passion for eating, I have to say that a good amount of the bonding we have done has been over pints of ice cream, bowls of soup, whole lasagnas, and pizza (not necessarily all at once, but that is a possibility). Ice cream in particular is our epicureal conquest of choice. Last winter (I hate winter), I was largely nursed through the dark frigid season of death by Rachel’s company and bowls (and bowls and bowls) of ice cream. The Ben and Jerry’s buffet night, I think amply exemplifies the extent of our zeal. Picture us, propped up on Rachel’s boat sized couch with pillows sufficient for a harem and before us, the spread. We had just discovered that the Dan’s on Foothill has far superior ice cream selection to the Smith’s by our house and we were celebrating: Cake Batter, Chunky Monkey, Chubby Hubby, Brownie Batter, and something with chocolate and cheesecake. We ate…well…most of it that night. 
left, neglected, melting away in the center console of my Subaru an hour after our stop. It was mostly milk and made from a thin sort of corn syrupy tasting soft serve. The peach was not anything close to fresh and was largely absent. The burger—dry, squashed bun, no lettuce or tomatoes or onion—was choked down because I have blood sugar problems and have to eat protein every two hours. The enchiladas were…well, the corn tortillas were half cooked on one side and over cooked on the other, the sauce was from a can, the entire thing tasted of gas station microwave cuisine. And the cheese! How can you ruin cheese? Cheese is a miracle ingredient! And has the power to save even the most lack luster dish! Not this time…
