Gold Butte National Monument, Nevada, February 11 - 15, 2020

Stephanie B

Stephanie B

Steph and Blake
.
Joined
Dec 7, 2017
Messages
264
My husband and I ventured over to Gold Butte National Monument last week and had a great time. The weather was perfect! We camped at Whitney Pocket and took a number of day hikes within the Monument. I don't really have much to offer in terms of photos. For that you'd be far better off checking out the following trip reports that served as inspiration for us.

What I will share is this:
  • While we only explored the more northern part of the Monument, we felt it was quite varied in terms of terrain and visuals. Some parts reminded us of Death Valley, some of White Pocket, others of Turtle Mountain Wilderness in California, and others of the nearby Bowl of Fire.
  • My favorite hike was to Kirk's Grotto (aka Keyhole Canyon). It was (literally) quite cool and an unusual setting for rock art. Blake's favorite hike was wandering around the area that "contains" the Falling Man petroglyph. Every time we turned around, there was another rock art panel.
  • Little Finland is not to be missed. I think kids would have a blast there.
  • Although Whitney Pocket is only 30 miles south of Mesquite on a "paved" road, it's a long-ish, tedious drive out there. Lots of potholes and washboard at present. And the roads that we traveled south and southwest of Whitney Pocket weren't much better. Not once did we feel we needed high clearance but we did use 4WD a few times. We saw a few regular sedans getting around seemingly fine, but I don't know what it would be like if it had rained or snowed.
  • If you are looking for solitude and you want to camp at Whitney Pocket (which has several, large, dispersed camping sites), you'll be much happier if you go during the week. We arrived on a Tuesday and there were just a few campers in the area. On Thursday afternoon more and more campers were moving in. By Friday we counted 10 large horse trailers at one site, 6 large toy haulers in another, and another large group in a third. And it looked like many, many ATV's and UTV's had driven down from a staging area south of Mesquite. Gold Butte is not a little-known secret.
  • Having said that, of the 5 hikes we took we saw only a maximum of three other people on the trail and those hikes were quite peaceful.
  • Lastly, we were told by some other hikers that the folks who run "Friends of Gold Butte" out of Mesquite were very helpful in offering advice and directions for hikes on the Monument.
Nick's Gold Butte x2

Yvonne's Gold Butte Campout

Randy's Kohta Circus

Randy's Falling Man

Dennis's Trip Report
 
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Thanks for the up-date, appreciate it! Glad you got out there and had a great time :). It's still on our to-do list.
 
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