The Needles: Chesler Park

Hilary and I were sitting on the terrace of a cafe in Moab, Utah, with our friends Keith Kroschel and Gayle Anderson, drinking beer, eating juicy burgers with guacamole, and relishing the sunlight of the declining day. We'd driven across the mountains from Denver and then taken the scenic route across the Uncompahgre Plateau, down the gorgeous Unaweep-Tabeguache Byway, and then through the Paradise Valley up and over the La Sals. They'd driven out from Minneapolis and down past Flaming Gorge. We stayed that night at the Ramada Inn, and the next morning we loaded our gear into our rented vehicles—they'd secured a SUV, we'd merely received a dubious upgrade from “compact” to “minivan”—and proceeded south along the eastern edge of Canyonlands National Park toward the Needles District.

Gayle and Keith are veterans of the Needles district—the southeastern section of the park. They've hiked there several times, both alone and with their kids, and we'd heard many tales of the beautiful campsites just outside the park along the Lockhart Basin road, with red cliffs in the distance to the north and east, and miles of open sky to the west. We'd also heard that these “dispersed” camping areas often became noisy and wild as mountain bikers and sport-jeep enthusiasts crowded into the area during spring break, and we weren't sure quite what to expect as we turned off the highway and began heading west toward the Needles. The road drops down from the plateau into the canyon country after a few miles, and as you pass Newspaper Rock there are trailers and tents here and there amid the groves of trashy tamarisks along the riverbed. Emerging from this mile-long thicket, we found ourselves surrounded on three sides by towering redrock buttes, with open desert straight ahead. The highway rises and falls as it snakes out beyond the rough-hewn buttes toward the park, with cattle grazing in the distance and jeep-trails leading up every canyon, heading toward places like Beef Basin, Davis Canyon, and Lockhart Reservoir. We'd hoped to find a suitable place to camp before reaching this last-named track, but the roads we attempted to traverse soon proved too rutted to be passable by any vehicle other than a true jeep.

The road to Lockhart Basin heads north, and it will eventually take you all the way along the east side of the park back to Moab, but on its southerly reaches it contains some of the prime real estate for dispersed camping in the Needles District. The sign by the turn-off says nothing about camping, but there are two campsites marked on the map, and anyone driving by who happened to look out that way would see a few trailers scattered here and there among the widely dispersed junipers and pinyons.

We had not been driving for long on this road before we spotted a tent pitched in the shadow of a long outcropping of slickrock to the northeast, so we turned off the gravel road onto a faint track that lead across the wasteland in that direction. As we approached the rock we could see that there were tents set up all along the eastern flank. Yet the rock itself was far larger than it had appeared from a distance. Circling around the north end we came upon two unoccupied creases in the rock, side by side, fifty feet apart, with a picnic table and a sturdy juniper tree set between them. We'd found our place for the night.

As evening approached the distant cliffs and buttes took on deep shades of purple, red and ochre. The sky itself was achingly beautiful. A hundred yards to the east of us a trailer had pulled into the shelter of the rocks, and when we had finished our dinner I walked over in that direction. An old man was sitting in a folding lawn chair beside the trail. He cradled a tall glass containing ice and a clear liquid, and he was contentedly watching the colors change on the cliffs to the east.

“Every year my wife and I drive this way coming back from California,” he told me, “And we always camp at the north end of this rock. It's the prettiest place in the world.”

The next morning we made our way to the trailhead that leads to Chesler Park. It wasn't a longways in to campsite we'd reserved—four or five miles--but we had worried ourselves for weeks about how much water we really had to bring with us. One thing was for sure--there was none to be had in the country we were heading to. The trail took us down into ravines, across washes, and up across spectacular slickrock slabs, from the heights of which you could see the grandeur of the snowcapped La Sals a hundred miles to the north. In the washes there

would be signs pointing the way to places like Squaw Flat, Big Spring Canyon and Druid Arch. As we penetrated the harsh and desolate landscape we seemed to be entering a domain of extreme remoteness, though as we approached Chesler Park itself hikers began to appear out of nowhere. Equipped with better vehicles, they'd driven to access points of the far side of the park.

We reached our designated campsite at noon. Stopped to set up camp and eat a bit of lunch, still nursing our precious water supplies, and then set out on what we imagined would be a circumnavigation of the “park” itself. We came upon a cowboy camp tucked into the rocks, with an old stove and graffiti that said “1935, My first winter –cold as hell. Mike.”

It was two in the afternoon by the time we reached a choice spot looking out across the park to the Maze district on the other side of the river—probably ten miles away—and we sat for a while attempting to identify which buttes and cliffs we were actually looking at with the aid of a map. By this time we were pretty tired, however, and it seemed unlikely that we'd complete the circuit around the park the way we'd planned it at the kitchen table back home. In fact, by the time we made it back to camp evening was approaching. We prepared dinner and watched the shadows creep up the sides of the hoodoos and cliffs we were ensconced among. It had become obvious by this time that we had brought plenty of water, and nothing could dampen our spirits except the slow but ineluctable rising of the wind.

The wind rattled our tents all night with almost comical violence. In the morning, though the sky above us remained clear, the air was cold and there were gray clouds building to the south. We had been on the trail for half an hour when the rain hit. During the heaviest downpour we sat under an overhang in a canyon and watched the water trickle down the face of the rock. By the time we'd emerged from the canyon and threaded the "needles" after which the region is named, the rain had stopped, and the broad slickrock tables were dotted with pools of water, adding one further ornament to a scene that could hardly have been more beauitful.