It was nearly the last day of his trek and Alex Maier was stuck in a slot canyon.
Maier was just outside Zion National Park, days away from the conclusion of the Hayduke Trail, and couldn’t find an exit route from the deep gorge he had to cross.
“I’m already a little bit freaked out because I’m having a hard time getting out of this canyon and I had to set up a tent in a tight slot canyon where flash flooding is a concern,” recounted Maier, a long-distance hiker and documentary filmmaker. “Then the next morning I woke up and just had to go figure out a way to get out.”
There was no specific trail, because the Hayduke Trail is something of a misnomer; much of it is backcountry bushwhacking.
A grueling 800-mile trek that winds through six national parks in southern Utah and northern Arizona, the Hayduke Trail is a relatively unknown long-distance route born of a failed marriage and named after a fictional anarchist character in an Edward Abbey novel.
Hikers said the trail showcases some of the Colorado Plateau’s finest scenery but, in traversing stark landscapes with unreliable water, can seriously test those who try it. Some said it also requires skills increasingly lost in modern through-hiking — grappling with the unknown; problem-solving in the backcountry; and contending with an unbroken, immense solitude.
“There are probably more people who start the [Pacific Crest Trail] on April 1 each spring than there are people who do the entire Hayduke Trail in a season,” said famous adventure athlete Andrew Skurka, who hiked the trail in 2009.
Maier, who did escape the slot canyon eventually, had slightly more pointed words.
“The Hayduke has a lot of moments that are very intense, where you’re in fear for your life,” he said. “I didn’t really have those moments on other trails. … You get yourself into a lot of situations on the Hayduke where, if you make one wrong move, you could fall down a cliff.”
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
A trail born of a failing marriage
Though it’s perhaps best known today for breaking backs, the Hayduke was born of something closer to heartbreak.
It was 1998 and Mike Coronella, a self-described ski bum living in Salt Lake City, was grappling with a failing marriage. He knew he needed some serious desert therapy.
“I mentioned, ‘You know how they talk about in those good books about 40 days in the desert?’” Coronella, a Moab resident, recalled telling his friend. “I need about twice that.”
Coronella said he and the friend, Joe Mitchell, immediately started crafting a cross-country route that would take them from Arches National Park to Zion National Park, passing through Bryce, Capitol Reef and Canyonlands along the way.
“He [Mitchell] is pretty much a whiz with the maps, and with some input he put together this route,” said Coronella, a hiking guide and just-retired member of Grand County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue.
Their first trek, completed in spring 1998, took three full months and exposed the friends to the desert’s full range of weather, from weeks of snow showers to 100-degree days. At the end, a magazine reporter suggested they build a trail out of their trip.
“That wasn’t really anything we’d contemplated,” Coronella said. Plus, the men were a bit busy — Coronella said they spent the first month after the hike devouring food.
“We definitely didn’t have adequate nourishment on the first journey,” he said.
Still, the idea held appeal. They dubbed the route the Colorado Plateau Trail and would use it to raise awareness of public land issues in the West. They also found a way to include what Coronella called the “big mac daddy of the whole system”: Grand Canyon National Park.
The addition tacked on another 300 or so miles to the already 500-mile route. It also introduced the duo to some of their wildest experiences as they started the trek again, backwards.
Setting off from Zion in 2000, Coronella and Mitchell’s trip quickly hit a snag when they had to detour off their route, climbing out of a canyon to avoid high water in the east fork of the Virgin River.
Destroying their water containers on the way, Coronella said he and Mitchell took a detour to resupply in small towns along the Arizona-Utah border then dominated by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“That was a really unnerving experience,” Coronella recalled.
He said he remembers the local fire marshal following the pair as they walked through town. When they requested Pop-Tarts at the town store, the clerk said he had never heard of them.
“I just went, ‘Holy cow, this place is weird,’” Coronella said.
After stocking up, Mitchell and Coronella set off for the Grand Canyon. They had pled their case for permits the previous fall with the park’s head backcountry ranger.
Coronella remembered the ranger warning the men of two things: First, that their intended route had an “unbelievable” amount of exposure.
“‘If you die out there, the coyotes are going to scatter your bones,’” Coronella recounted the ranger saying. “And we were kind of OK with that. …
“Then he goes, ‘The last person who came through the canyon like this on their own without any outside support was Major John Wesley Powell.’”
That stopped Coronella in his tracks.
In the end, however, they largely followed their original route — at a cost.
“We got our butts kicked out there pretty soundly,” Coronella said.
(Mike Coronella) The first version of the Hayduke Trail, an 800-mile backcountry route across Utah and Arizona, traversed a fist-clenching route in Grand Canyon National Park rimmed with sheer drop-offs.
A grand, dangerous canyon
Coronella and Maier both pointed at the Grand Canyon as the route’s most physically demanding section.
Since it lies near one end of the trail, many spring hikers who start in Arches end up crossing the 6,000-foot-deep crevasse in the heat of early summer.
“I remember one day it was 112 [degrees] or something,” said Maier. “You’re just baking down there. When you’re suffering like that, it makes decisions hard to make, too. I made a couple bad decisions and had to retrace my steps and go back, and that’s always really defeating.”
Today, the Hayduke Trail follows a different Grand Canyon route than what Coronella and Mitchell attempted in 2000. Then, they were piecing together routes written up by earlier hikers. The connections didn’t always work as well as they’d hoped.
“There were places we had to do knife ridges that had thousands of feet [of drop-off] on either side,” Coronella said. “My hands are getting sweaty just thinking about it. At one point we made it down to the [Colorado River] on an improvised route that you probably could not force me to take at gunpoint, but we had to get water that day or we were done.”
At that point, the pair had already gone a full day without water. They reached the river, miraculously, only to learn from a pair of boaters that their equipment was wildly insufficient for the rest of the route.
“It turns out we would’ve died out there if we hadn’t met these guys,” Coronella said.
Coronella and Mitchell took the boaters’ recommended route and, after running out of water again, made it out of the canyon after 32 days under the rim.
The rest of the 101-day trip to Arches National Park proved hot and dry. The pair changed plans a few times, dispensing with a San Rafael Swell route to instead pass through Canyonlands National Park’s Maze District. They floated across the Green River on air mattresses and reached Arches during a wickedly hot June.
“We were ready to be done by this time,” Coronella admitted.
(Wilderness Mindset) Water is usually challenging along the 800-mile Hayduke Trail because of its scarcity — but when Alex Maier, a long-distance hiker and documentarian, traveled the route, he encountered a flooded slot canyon.
Keeping the Hayduke ‘off the beaten path’
After their second trip, Coronella and Mitch wrote a guidebook, published by the University of Utah Press in 2005.
They had high hopes for the trail, envisioning it as the newest addition to the National Scenic Trail network.
Run by the National Park Service, the network is comprised of 11 long-distance, largely non-motorized trails. It includes legendary backpacking routes such as the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail.
But Coronella said the trail needed some form of blessing from state government. And when Utah officials learned the route was entirely non-motorized, Coronella recounted, they said they weren’t interested.
“That day, the Colorado Plateau Trail became the Hayduke Trail,” said Coronella.
George Washington Hayduke III is a character in Edward Abbey’s book “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” A crass veteran, he leads a renegade team of environmentalists who sabotage industry and infrastructure in the Four Corners region.
The two men hoped the name would highlight their passion for public lands while challenging state officials. Still, the pair didn’t much mind the exclusion of the trail from the national network.
“The Hayduke Trail to me is more of this ephemeral thing that depends on who you are and what the weather is and what kind of time you got and your skillset,” Coronella said. “It might be a little different than the next person’s.”
He and Skurka agreed that every Hayduke hiker does it a little differently — altering routes, placing different food caches, veering off-script to stock up in towns along the way.
“It’s both a necessity and an expectation that hikers will modify the route to get it to work for them and meet their goals,” Skurka said.
Because of that “choose-your-own-adventure” aspect, Skurka said, the Hayduke Trail might be more appropriately called the Hayduke Route. It’s not suitable for formalization, he added.
“Edward Abbey would be rolling in his grave if he was told that a long-distance trail in his name was going to be built through southern Utah and northern Arizona,” Skurka joked.
Maier, who sought out the Hayduke Trail specifically for its solitude, said incorporating it into a formal network would also bring rules, committees, signage and trail work, which make the trail easier — but also undermine its ethos.
“I’m sure a lot of people would like that, but I think it would take away from the spirit of why the trail was founded in the first place,” Maier said.
‘Figure it out’
Maier created a documentary on the Hayduke Trail that reflects the extreme self-reliance required on the route. Called “Figure It Out on the Hayduke Trail,” the 10-part series chronicles his 2018 trip from Arches to Zion.
The title came to him and his hiking partner naturally, Maier said, when they continually encountered unexpected obstacles or insufficient information along the route.
“There is no resource that’s going to tell you everything, and that’s kind of what I was looking for,” Maier said.
The Hayduke Trail features a mix of single-track trails, Jeep roads and bushwhacking across open terrain. It includes multiple 100-mile sections between possible food caches. Hikers must complete plenty of problem-solving as they scramble along cliffs, into and out of slot canyons and across swift rivers.
But most notable, some said, is the lack of information about the route in an era when hiking is increasingly digitized.
Skurka said long-distance hiking has been “kind of transformed” by smartphones and GPS in the last decade. The Hayduke, however, still requires old-fashioned navigation by compass and map.
“You can’t do the Hayduke Trail using Alltrails or Gaia,” Coronella agreed. “… It’s the whole idea of figuring it out on your own. All the questions except weather are taken away on the [Pacific Crest Trail], the [Appalachian Trail]. You know where you’re going; you can plot every single step of that thing using Google Earth or Google Maps. The Hayduke Trail is still primitive.”
The trail does have a small presence on social media; there’s an active Facebook group for Hayduke hikers. Coronella said the trail has taken on a life of its own in a way he never expected.
And Coronella himself? He’s not sure he ever captured the solace he sought in 1998 but found other things — the purity of the desert, a place without margins, as abrasive as it is astonishing.
“I think the idea is just getting out there into this harsh environment on your own, the things you’re going to experience are unique to the desert,” Coronella said. “… Like, I wouldn’t shut my eyes at night until I got to see one shooting star. It’s things like that that you just aren’t going to find anywhere else.”
This story was first published by The Times-Independent.