Location: Paria Canyon, Utah
Trip Dates: 09/26/25 to 09/30/25
Published on: 11/01/25
Every year I organize a guy’s backpacking trip. I invite a growing group of 10 to 15 good buddies and whoever can make it shows up. This year, 2025, was trip number four, and I decided on Paria Canyon in Utah/Arizona. A good work colleague of mine had invited me to join him and some others on his Paria trip in 2024. I couldn't swing it that year, but looking at photos of the place made me envious that I was going to miss it, so I vowed to circle back.
A caltopo map I made of our trip. https://caltopo.com/m/TLF2KR9/LLPR3BA1EP6199CV
Friday September 26th comes around and 6 of my close friends showed up to Lee’s Ferry Campground in Arizona for this trip. We all showed up at different times with my buddy Connor and I showing up last with a ton of the shared gear. We packed our bags in the dark by headlamp and we were all rushing to get everything done. We got to sleep around midnight and woke up early to get picked up Saturday morning (the 27th) for the shuttle ride to the start of the trail at White House Trailhead in Utah. This backpacking trip was expected to be three nights and four days covering 37 miles through the canyon and across state lines. We left our cars at the end point at Lee's Ferry and we would be hiking back towards them.
Our shuttle driver, Yermo, was a local guide and search-and-rescue volunteer. During the drive he gave us the rundown on what we were getting ourselves into:
But among all his advice, the key piece of info that he drilled into us in that hour+ car ride was that this canyon gets deadly when it rains upstream. What's normally just ankle-deep pools can turn into a raging river that floods the narrow canyon. He told us the standard in the area is to not let people hike the canyon when 3/4” to an 1” of rain is forecasted upstream. We were expecting 1/2” that first night... "You're right below the line where I'd tell people not to go," he said, "but you should be fine."
We had originally planned to hike 12 miles to our first campsite on day one, but after a recommendation from Yermo, we decided to only go 7 miles since we were getting a later start and there was a great campground at that point.
Here is the group of us before starting out from White House Trailhead. Photo credit to Yermo. From left to right: Max Linstrom, Duncan Sullivan, John Zornosa, Myself, Evan Petruzzi, Connor High, and Erich Hamil.
Our first day of hiking in was easy and lighthearted. We did our 7 miles in a couple hours, dealt with one spot where water got up to our shins, and made it to camp. As we reached the campground area, it started to rain. That night we cooked in the rain, went to bed in the rain, and throughout the night it kept raining. The dry canyon floor that we'd hiked in to get to the campsite earlier was now a small river, and it grew throughout the night.
While we were setting up our tents, we met a couple who was camping a couple hundred feet from us. They stopped by to say hello, we shared some small talk about where we were from, and we took some photos of one another. They were a nice pair — they drove from LA (9 hours) to do one night in the canyon and were planning on hiking out the next morning.
The first 7 miles was the only time on this trip where we weren’t soaked.
We started out from camp at around 10am and it was exactly what we’d feared after hearing rain pound all night: we were hiking in water from the start and throughout the day. This was ankle to knee height, not too bad. The water was a rich caramel color and this is where we learned first hand why Yermo leant Erich those hiking poles: the ground underneath us was super variable in height and we couldn’t see where we were stepping due to the mud, so feeling around with poles before you moved forward was crucial. This kept us from moving quickly and I remember thinking, “Oh we’re going about a mile per hour right now… that’s too damn slow”. We had wanted to get roughly 10 miles further into the canyon that day, and I realized that wasn’t going to happen.