Share Our World: Grand Wash Hike-- with rating

On the second day at Capital Reef National Park we went on the Grand Wash Hike.

It is a nice flat 2.25 miles hike one way and you can go as far as you want up the wash and turn back when you are ready, which I found really nice. We started the hike at 10:00am and ended at around 11:20am so about an hour and a half.

The vertical cliffs were so tall.
This is a picture with @jarvie in it for comparison

This hike gets a 8/10

Sara's Rating	Part of hike	My thoughts
2	Access to trail	Easy access, there is parking along the road right by the trailhead
2	Difficulty	It is a very easy walk
1	Views	Interesting with the high canyon walls and holes in the walls
1	Destination	We didn't have a specific destination
2	Time on trial	One and a half hours at a slow pace taking pictures along the way

This is a very easy hike that has the ability to see very interesting Southern Utah geography up close. We took our time and enjoyed collecting cool rocks on the path and some of us joined others in putting them into the canyon walls. There were few people which was nice. You could be around others in your group or alone. Occasionally you would see other groups and say hi as you passed. I didn't know anything about this hike before we started and I enjoyed it while we were doing it and have great memories of it. There is not a lot of shade so a good hat would be nice.

What is a wash?

We walked through wash. You my be asking what is a wash?

According to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Desert washes are also called xeroreparian habitats to indicate their relationship with rivers. Like typical rivers, washes are linear, chronically disturbed habitats that concentrate water and nutrients from a large area, and serve as dispersal corridors for plants and animals. The main difference is that washes have surface water for only brief periods, often just for a few hours in a year.

So it is an area where the water flows down the canyon when there are very heavy rains.

You can see there are some plants and trees along the path of the wash.

There were a few things about this hike that really stood out to me.

1. The high canyon walls

Here is another picture for scale

The holes in the walls

I found these holes in the walls fascinating. Does anyone know how or why they form?
It was fun to see people putting rocks from the path in the holes.