On Friday the 25th, JoAnn, Kelly and I rented a 4-door Jeep Rubicon for the day. Our first destination was Marble Canyon, which is reached by a road which begins at Stovepipe Wells and runs west toward the Cottonwood Mountains. The first 8 miles is bumpy but navigable for any high-clearance vehicle, but after that you really want four-wheel drive.
After a few miles of bumping along over small boulders and through deep gravel pockets, we reached a fork in the road, and following the advice of Yogi Berra, we took it. The left fork goes to Cottonwood Canyon; we took the right, which continues to Marble Canyon.
Our Jeep Rubicon, with JoAnn (right) driving and Kelly riding shotgun.
At about the 8-mile point we passed through a gap in the hills and continued onto the rougher section of the road. Looking back at the western side of the hills through which we had passed, I noted that the cliffs were pock-marked with little holes, plus one big one, which to me looked a bit like a keyhole. I have no idea whether it leads to a cave, of if it already has a name, but I gave it one: Keyhole Kave.
Eventually we reached the Marble Canyon trailhead, where vehicular traffic ends and further progress has to be made on foot. We parked the Jeep and set forth on the Marble Canyon trail.
The Marble Canyon trail is part of a loop, known as the Cottonwood Marble Trail, 26 to 28 miles long; the other end of the loop is at the end of the fork in the road from Stovepipe Wells that we didn’t take, i.e. the Cottonwood Canyon road. The loop trail is classified as difficult, with a 3882-feet elevation gain, but the part we hiked on was pretty easy. If you want to backpack the whole trail, it takes two or three days.
Jo and Kelly only wanted to hike to a dry falls about 5 miles into the canyon, and I set forth with them, but after a mile or so, I realized that I wasn’t equipped for even that short a hike: I hadn’t worn my hiking boots and I hadn’t brought enough water. So I turned back while they continued on to the falls; and I meandered back to the Jeep, shooting pictures of the rocks along the way. The rocks in Marble Canyon are amazing.
The cliffs lining the sides of Marble Canyon consist of layers of rock tilted at a sharp angle to the horizontal, and in many places banded with alternating light and dark strata.
Interspersed with the banded layers were rocks with idiosyncratic features such as irregular “splotches” of white embedded in a matrix of completely different character.
There were also places where instead of splotches there were white streaks, as if the same vandal responsible for the splotches had brought a brush and a bucket of paint and started painting the rocks white before being caught and hustled off.
We also noticed a great many circular or oval “patches”, looking as if someone had drilled a hole in the rock and inserted a plug. These had many different colors and textures; some just consisted of different-colored rock, others looked as if they were surfaced with lichen or moss.
After arriving back at the parking lot, I took a nap in the Jeep while waiting for Jo and Kelly to return. Then we drove back to Stovepipe Wells, and, after a short sojourn, went on to our next destination, Monarch Canyon.