Buckskin Gulch
Interesting facts
- Buckskin Gulch is often described as the longest and deepest slot canyon in the American Southwest, and some guides claim it is the longest in the world.
- For most of its length the canyon averages less than ten feet wide, while its walls rise to about 500 feet near the Paria confluence.
- Flood-borne logs have been found wedged between the walls some 40 feet above the canyon floor.
- Paria Canyon and its tributaries average around eight flash floods a year, and each one can reshape obstacles inside the narrows.
- About a mile and a half above the Paria, huge boulders jammed in a constriction drop the floor by roughly 20 feet.
- Hikers sometimes crawl beneath that rockfall through a gap nicknamed the Rabbit Hole, when floods have not clogged it with sand.
- Ancient petroglyph panels, including bighorn sheep, are pecked into the walls near Wire Pass and at the Middle Route exit.
- The gulch joins the Paria River almost exactly on the Utah–Arizona state line.
- Some older maps label the canyon Kaibab Gulch or simply The Dive.
Why it is worth it
Buckskin Gulch is a slot canyon of rare length: a crack in the red rock of the Colorado Plateau that runs for more than sixteen miles before it joins the Paria River. For roughly twelve and a half miles of that course it is a narrow corridor, a hundred to two hundred feet deep, between twisting walls of Navajo Sandstone, the petrified dune sand that gives much of the American Southwest its swirling cross-bedded cliffs. In places the walls stand so close that daylight reaches the floor only as a thin, reflected glow.
The gulch lies in southern Kane County, Utah, just north of the Arizona line, inside the Paria Canyon–Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, a protected area of about 112,500 acres designated by Congress in 1984. It is one of the main tributaries of the Paria, which in turn flows south through its own deep canyon to meet the Colorado River at Lees Ferry. The same wilderness holds the sandstone formations of Coyote Buttes, including the swirling outcrop known as the Wave.
Most people enter Buckskin through Wire Pass, a short side canyon that Coyote Wash has carved through the ridge known as The Cockscomb; other routes begin at the Buckskin, White House and Lees Ferry trailheads. The canyon's form is a record of the force that shaped it. The surrounding country is largely bare slickrock, and even a quarter of an inch of rain can run off it and send a flash flood through the narrows. The canyon is managed as wilderness, and both day and overnight trips require permits issued by the Bureau of Land Management.
Getting there
The trailheads are reached from U.S. Route 89 in Utah, roughly halfway between Kanab, Utah, and Page, Arizona. Wire Pass Trailhead lies about 8.4 miles south along the unpaved House Rock Valley Road, which leaves US-89 some 37.5 miles east of Kanab; Page is about 34 miles to the southeast. The nearest airport is Page Municipal Airport (PGA), about 38 km away in a straight line. Cedar City, the nearest larger city, is about 130 km to the northwest.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- The Wave 12.5 km · rock-formation
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Buckskin Gulch is a gulch and canyon located in southern Kane County, Utah, near the Arizona border in the Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness. With a length of over 16 miles (26 km), it is one of the main tributaries of the Paria River, a tributary of the Colorado River.
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