A Photographic Diary For Buckskin Gulch Trekking

   Buckskin Gulch is a branch of Paria Canyon located around Grand Canyon North Rim in Utah. While Paria Canyon itself covers  rather wide area, the most popular route to trekkers is the 61km long route, starting at Whitehouse Campground through Paria River till Lee's Ferry at the junction of Paria River and Colorado River. The full trekking takes around 5~6 days. Buckskin Gulch is a 26km long branch, which starts at Buckskin Gulch Trailheadand ends at the junction (named Confluence) of Paria River. Trekkers usually choose the short-cut 22km long route starting at Wirepass Trailhead, not because this route is shorter but because Wirepass is another beautiful trekking route so that it should not be missed. We also chose this short-cut route.   Buckskin Gulch is a kind of slot canyon resulting from some cracks on rocks, which is very famous one day or two day trekking route to trekkers because of its spectacular scenery. Moreover, you could enjoy the mysterious, rainbow  canyon colored by the sunlight shedding into the narrow valley, if you could well arrange the trekking timing. However, it turns to the very dangerous route in rainy days because these rains are gathering in this very narrow canyon to make a furious current. Therefore, you should check the weather of other surrounding areas as well as Buckskin Gulch when you are planning Buckskin Gulch Trekking, although there is one and the only exit called 'Middle Exit' at the middle part of Buckskin Gulch. And any drinking water is not available through the whole Buckskin Gulch, so you should carry 2 liter drinking water or more especially during the summer.   When preparing for the first trekking in 2013 and for the second trekking in 2015, we could not find out any well organized information concerning the whole route even with repetative googling and even from Google Earth. What does Rock Jam immediately before Confluence look like? What about Cesspool around Middle Exit? And What does Middle Exit itself look like? All of these information were very fragmentary and very insufficient.      This book is about our second 37km long Buckskin Gulch trekking, starting from Wirepass Trailhead at 5:30am, May 16, 2015, through Buckskin Gulch and Confluence to Whitehouse Trailhead. The sparsely scattered photos for the whole route of Buckskin Gulch available on internet motivated me to prepare this document for helping other trekkers who plan to explore this wonderful but scarring route.   For this purpose, I tried to cover almost all aspects of Buckskin Gulch by minute in this dicument, and around 600 photos were selected and included in this book from 1,200 photos taken during the whole trekking. The photos are, however, insufficient for (aka) Cesspool, where I couldn't take many photos, because I dropped one of my cameras in the water pool. For Cesspool, I included several images captured from ActionCams by other members. I included also several photos taken during my preliminary visit with my wife and during our first trekking, as far as these photos might help readers figure out Buckskin Gulch.   I also included rough location information on the map and EXIF data on photos to help readers get clearer ideas on the route.   I have to mention that this document might not reflect the normal trekking of Buckskin Gulch because our trekking was done on the following day after a couple of heavy rains and because it took us almost 17 hours.