After a meetup with Dave, who planned this trip, a day before at White Pocket, Dave, Laurent, Mike, Gudrun, Herbert and me met at the end of a short road from Hole-In-The-Rock Arch at the WSA boundary, We planned to do a hike to see Sky Pocket and Lost City that day and Dave promised, that we are the first ones, who ever explored Lost City. He has seen Sky Pocket, but was not hiking to Lost City before.
We started from the trailhead and passed Anvil Butte (Daves name) to the left. We tried to avoid too many up´s and down´s in the sand.
Soon, we were able to see Sky Pocket from the distance. It is high above the ground on the left side ridge. Sky Pocket is an incredibly beautiful area, which forced us to take a lot of pictures. The next day, we did a different hike, which allowed us to see Sky Pocket from above.
After leaving Sky Pocket and hiking further down, we soon arrived at a wave kind formation, which Dave saw before from the ridge above this valley. He called it Micro Wave, but we did not like that name. After naming it Chocolate Wave, we finally ended up calling it ‘Mocha Wave’, because of the color of the rock.
A little bit further down, we arrived at the end of the ridge on the left and saw the first domes of Lost City. There is also a rock formation, which looks like an octopus head, which we called ‘Octopus Rock’.
We hiked around the end of the ridge and arrived at Lost City, which again offered us outstanding photo options. We had our lunch break there and hiked around to catch as many impressions as possible. There is also a slot canyon further up in this area and a canyon, which looks like the canyons near Escalante, UT. Dave called that canyon ‘Pseudo Escalante’.
After staying there for some time and taking as much photos as possible, Mike, Gudrun, Herbert and me decided to hike back to the trailhead, as we had to drive out to Cliff Dwellers, where we had our accommodations. Dave and Laurent decided to hike further and explore Pseudo Escalante and go down to the Paria Canyon. They wanted to hike back the other side of the valley.
We backtracked our hiking route around the end of the ridge and went back towards our jeeps parallel to the ridge on the right. As the way back is continuously going upwards, we tried to hike on the rocks instead of in the sand.
We passed Sky Pocket and saw on our way to Sky Pocket a nice hoodoo, which was lonely sitting on a huge rock surface.
After following a wash, we surrounded Anvil Butte and had been soon at the trailhead to enjoy something to drink.
The overall hike was about 4.5 miles, if I remember correctly. The area down there waits for more exploring and I am sure, a lot more secrets can be found down there.
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And here one can also download a gpx file of this trip:
Tracklog: Sky Pocket and Lost City, Vermilion Cliffs NM, AZ (1019 downloads )
The following map shows the hiking trail (a big thank you to Gudrun and Herbert for providing the gpx file of the hike) and the route to get to the trailhead:
