A 75-Day Backpacking Adventure in the American Southwest

Hiking the Hayduke Trail

After two bike tours and a sea kayak tour, we decided it was time to lace up our boots and go for a walk–and so we hiked the Hayduke Trail. This is a rugged through-hike in southern Utah and northern Arizona in the beautiful canyons and deserts that make the American Southwest a magical place. This was an amazing experience, especially since this was the first through-hike (long backpacking trip) for both of us!

Bryce Canyon, Hayduke Trail 2009

This desert backpacking trip started in Arches National Park just outside Moab, Utah, and took us through Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Capitol Reef National Park, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Bryce Canyon National Park, Grand Canyon National Park and Zion National Park.

Some of the route is on established trails or jeep roads, much of it follows canyon and wash bottoms, and there is some cross-country navigation. The route is about 850 miles, though with re-supply trips off-route it came to a bit more.

We carried just what we needed and no more. We invested in a few key pieces of ultra-light equipment, so that we could cover more miles a day, reducing the number of days’ worth of food and water we had to carry. We had a few dry camps, and carried water accordingly. We hiked the Hayduke Trail in 75 days, with plenty of rest days included. We re-supplied in towns at post offices about every five to ten days, as well as two buried caches.

We would like to thank Joe Mitchell and Mike Coronella for not only putting the route together but also publishing it so that others like have the opportunity to enjoy the route as well. There was a lot of work spread out over several years to get this thing together. Also, it’s wonderful that Joe Mitchell keeps a website with much of the info out there for people to discover online.

Our Hayduke Trail Experience & Resources

Here are the details of our beautiful Hayduke Trail backpacking trip – truly a trip of a lifetime!

For more reading on this desert adventure, see:

These websites were really helpful to us as we were researching the trip.

  • The Hayduke Trail route mapwww.hayduketrail.org – The official website, put together by Joe Mitchell, one of the Hayduke Trail co-founders. There are maps and route section descriptions as well as links to Hayduke Trail alumni websites. If you found our site, you’ve certainly already spent some time here. Most important resource area is the updates, with info on water sources being crucial!
  • www.ula-equipment.com/hayduke – This is Brian Frankle’s 2005 Hayduke experience. He was the first to complete the Hayduke trail in one go, and he did it ultra-light. His trip journal is well written and enjoyable, and he has been very helpful with some details we couldn’t find elsewhere. Brian has some really helpful info on his site about hiking off-route for re-supplies, which we made use of for our hike.
  • http://hayduketrail.blogspot.com – Ryan Choi’s descriptive and detailed 2008 Hayduke hike journal. He and his hiking partner followed the trail by the book – they cached 30 buckets of food and 200 gallons of water in order to hike without going off trail! There are some nice notes in the journal about flora and fauna on the trail. Ryan also posted incredibly helpful updates on water and trail descriptions to the updates portion of the main hayduketrail.org site. We used these notes almost daily on the trip, and we started referring to Ryan Choi as our Voice of Reason. Thank you Ryan.

What You Need to Hike the Hayduke Trail

The Hayduke Trail official route book is a must, and we are using the Utah and Arizona Topo maps by printing out only the areas we need to hike the Hayduke Route.