Thirteen years ago Louisa and I went into upper Tuckup Canyon in the Grand Canyon looking for a rock art site called the Shaman’s Gallery. We had a pretty good map to go by that was annotated and got us into the area. It was early January. We hiked down into the canyon but were unable to find the sitr. That was mostly because we didn’t know exactly where the site was or what it looked like. We only knew that it was in the upper part of the canyon. It was a nice hike in the canyon with one of my favorite people.
Last week I went back with several friends. We had down loaded and printed a cowboy map from the internet. Having been in the upper Tuckup area before I figured the map, drawn by mule/horse packer Gordon Smith who claims to have “discovered” the site in the 80’s. Never mind that there is old cowboy graffiti at the site.
The Smith map says that after turning left off of the Toroweep Road you just “stick to the main path”.

Can anyone guess which is the “main path”? This fork is right past the first cattle guard, corral and ponds shown on the map. We stuck to the left fork as it looked most traveled and wound up after some pretty extreme 4 wheeling on a hilltop about two miles from the canyon rim.

After hiking to the trail head we discovered by checking the GPS that one of my hiking friends had brought that we were at The head of 150 Mile Canyon, about 6.5 miles from the trailhead in Tuckup as the crow flies. Of course we are not crows and would have had to drive back to the corrals and then another 10+ miles back out to the canyon rim at Tuckup.

Cowboy relics encountered along the trail into One Hundred Fifty Mile Canyon.

It was a nice day and the country was beautiful. The Shaman’s Gallery will have to wait for another day….again. Next time we bring real maps. Here are some of what we saw while camped out at Toroweep.

Looking west from the Toroweep overlook at the end of the day.

Lava Falls is awe inspiring even from 3k’ up.

More scenes around the Toroweep area.

There was an old cowboy camp on the rim at Saddle Horse Canyon. Here is a stove, watering tank and a pipe line going to a water source below the rim.

Tags: Grand Canyon Hiking

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 12:28 am and is filed under General, Hiking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.