The Fold (or Reef further north) is a very long wrinkle in the earth in Utah. Steep, rugged and remote this loop is centered around the southern end of the Fold with weird domes and spires on the east side and dramatic sandstone canyons cutting into the long sloping west side, before they spill into the E.

The route focused on climbing the two high points in the area in addition to linking a series of hard to get in and out of canyons, all while doing a big loop.

On the 70 mile route we found no maintained trails but did follow a game path for an hour or so on day 4. We saw no one else, despite this is the busy hiking season in the canyons.

Images: https://imgur.com/a/A8fpjUr

Driving the last two hours to our east side start we encountered only four vehicles, a couple of which were a tow truck pulling out a wanna-be overlander. As Brian like to say when bouncing us across some remote mesa in his beat up Ford Exploder: “Overlanding? It’s called car camping. Been doing it forever“.

The trailhead was decided for us when the road ahead suddenly was completely washed out by a flash flood from the day before. We loaded our packs and soon descended steeply into the significant crevice of HC Canyon before the 2000’ climb to a divide in the Fold. Eventually down in the canyons on the other side things got complex.

Several days later we again emerged on top of the Fold but much farther north. After a day and a half traversing the lofty spine we picked our way down a remote part with striking arches and deep pools to finish off.

Planned with GE and Caltopo the route pays homage the great Steve Allen by linking parts of three of his adventures with some home brewed lines on the map.

The difficulty felt moderate; YMMV. We have a good amount of experience with one mile-an-hour terrain on the Plateau. Hauling and lowering packs is second nature and a willingness to solo fourth class with exposure is often just a deep breath away. The main challenge on this one is dead accurate navigation and constant focus while off trail’ing for 10 hours a day. Going solo would have been outside my comfort zone due to remoteness and lack of help with the dog, because, as Charlie Brown knows well: If my dog can't go - I'm not going.

Hardest isolated moves was the exit of F Canyon via a steep fifth class wall above slippery Moqui steps. The longest rope assisted obstacle was 70’ tall and a day earlier.

My dog took it all in stride, so maybe it all wasn’t so bad.

Water is always a serious planning concern on the Plateau. This trip was sketched out years ago and laid dormant on my computer waiting for the conditions that came together this late March: a couple of big spring storms covered the area with flash floods followed by an unseasonably cold high pressure: potholes and canyon bottoms got filled with water before we arrived and highs in the low forties kept it there for the entire trip. There was snow in the deep shade of the incredible mile long ledge walk 800’ above GC Canyon.

Our TPW was around thirty pounds. That included newly built framed packs for testing, 80’ of 6mm rope, a brick of a film camera and some real coffee brewing luxuries boosted by a sack of heavy cream powder.

New packs: https://imgur.com/a/8Hq0QSK

While we shared a 9x9 mid between three six foot plus guys and a dog, each of us did bring a white gas kitchen and the delicious food choices were individually packed, but carefully traded. To see us thru the cold evenings we took turns making pots of Mormon tea with raisins. All these core-warming hot drinks and elaborate dinners consumed a whopping 20 ounces of fuel per person.

Pro Bars and Lenny & Larry Complete cookies, in addition to salami, cheese, Fritos and torts completed the picture.

We used aqua mira as the silty post flood water would have killed a filter immediately. Cooking water needed no treating.

In packing our layers all us under estimated the wind and day-time biting cold, especially the conditions on top of the Fold. We even got hit with a couple of squally snow storms on the day long traverse from Cliff to Hall.

Lows hit the teens despite keeping all camps out of the deep canyon bottoms with their notorious pooling of cold air. Sharing a well sealed tent, wearing pretty much everything and eating a solid high fat diet gave us reasonable comfort with our non-quilts, aka sleeping bags, rated in the high twenties.

Phone/GPS navigation in this sort of complex terrain was indispensable. I loaded all phones with the route on 7.5 quads plus springs and known pothole waypoints. I also added pics of the appropriate pages from Allen’s book. We had three big power banks and spare charging cables, plus the redundancy of two capable apps with different map sets: iHike and MapOut. No single paper map covered the whole route so we didn’t bring any; also no one owned an emergency satellite beacon.