A Love Letter to Paria Canyon

Dreamland Safari Tours co-owner Sunny Stroeer has guided, run, and set speed records through the Paria Canyon system more times than she can count. This is her attempt to explain why.

It’s 5 a.m. and I’m pouring boiling water over my hiking boots. The leather is frozen solid – not stiff, solid – from sitting out all night in the 15-degree air at the bottom of Paria Canyon. Steam rises off the laces and disappears. The water goes from boiling to cold before it reaches the sole. Next to me, seven women in sleeping bags are starting to stir, and every single one of them is about to discover that her shoes have done the same thing.

This is a desert hike.

I live 45 minutes from the Paria River trailhead. I have run, walked, waded, and occasionally crawled through its canyon systems more times than I can count – five-plus through-hikes done car-to-car in a single day, two of those as women’s fastest known times, and a handful of 20-mile runs through Buckskin Gulch that I hesitate to call “fun” only because the word undersells the particular brand of suffering involved. I have guided the Paria for AWExpeditions more times than any other route. It was the first backpacking trip we ever offered through Dreamland Safari Tours. And it remains, stubbornly and without apology, the trip that I am most excited to talk about.

So what is it about the Paria?

It isn’t the most dramatic landscape I’ve ever worked in. I guide on Aconcagua; I’ve set speed records in the Himalayas and crossed the Grand Canyon in the dark. The Paria doesn’t have the altitude, the glaciers, or the name recognition. It doesn’t even look like much on a topo map – the elevation profile is essentially flat, a 38-mile ribbon of river bottom trending gently downhill from White House Trailhead to Lee’s Ferry. People glance at the numbers and assume it’ll be a casual stroll.

It is not a casual stroll.

The Paria is a water hike through a desert canyon, and if that sounds like a contradiction, good – you’re paying attention. For at least 20 of those 38 miles, you are wading. Not crossing a creek and moving on; wading, sometimes ankle-deep, sometimes waist-deep, through the opaque, silty, quicksand-laced Paria River while carrying a full backpack. The footing is uneven, invisible beneath the murk, and changes with every flood cycle. Your shoes are wet from the moment you step in on day one until the moment you take them off at Lee’s Ferry. On winter trips – well, you already know what happens on winter trips. The Paria doesn’t care what the elevation profile says; it will make you earn every single mile.

My husky, Dasher, learned this the hard way. She’s done the Paria with me – and on day two, a roughly ten-mile day deep in the bowels of the earth, the canyon showed her who’s boss. When we got to camp she flopped down in the sand, soaking wet, doggy backpack and all, and gave me a look that said I’m done. She wouldn’t get up. So I unclipped her little pack, toweled her off, and brought her straight into my sleeping bag – filthy dog, what what – where I served her dinner in bed while I cooked for the group. By the time the humans were eating, Dasher was dry and warm and snoring, and my sleeping bag just needed a good shake to get the sand out. She was fine by morning; the drama had been entirely performative. But for the record: even a sled dog found the Paria legitimately hard.

And yet.

This is the place where I have watched a woman in her late sixties complete her first-ever backpacking trip and come out the other side already asking when she could do it again. This is where I’ve seen a 27-year-old who’d never slept in a tent transform, over six days, into someone who carries herself differently – not because the canyon gave her anything she didn’t already have, but because the canyon stripped away everything that was in the way. I’ve seen this happen with women in their twenties, their thirties, their forties, their fifties, their sixties. The age doesn’t matter. What matters is the specific alchemy of this place: the remoteness, the physical challenge, the enforced simplicity of walking and wading and sleeping and doing it again.

The most different groups come together in Paria Canyon. I don’t mean “diverse” in the sanitized, brochure sense – I mean that the canyon attracts a genuinely unpredictable mix of humans. Corporate executives and teachers. Marathon runners and women who haven’t exercised in years. First-time backpackers and seasoned thru-hikers. And something about the rhythm of the route – the shared wading, the communal exhaustion, the fact that everyone’s shoes are equally disgusting by day three – collapses the usual social scaffolding. What replaces it are the kinds of conversations that most people don’t have in their regular lives. Real ones. The kind that happen because you’ve been walking through water together for eight hours and there’s no cell service and nothing to do but be present with each other.

I have watched backpacking guides hit their stride in the Paria. Not because it’s easy to guide – it isn’t; the river conditions are unpredictable, the temperature swings can be 50 degrees Fahrenheit between midday and midnight, and every trip requires judgment calls about weather, water levels, and group pacing – but because the canyon teaches you to read a landscape and a team simultaneously. Several of our most senior Dreamland backpacking guides hit their stride somewhere between White House and Lee’s Ferry.

Here’s what the Paria gives you that almost nowhere else can.

You get to sleep inside Buckskin Gulch. I need you to sit with that for a second. Buckskin Gulch is the longest slot canyon in North America – over 12 miles of sculpted Navajo sandstone so narrow that in places you can touch both walls at once, so deep that the sky shrinks to a thin blue ribbon hundreds of feet above your head. Most people who experience Buckskin at all do it as a day hike from the Wire Pass trailhead – a few miles in, a few miles out, done by lunch. On a Paria through-hike, you camp at the confluence where Buckskin meets the Paria River. You wake up there – that part alone is worth the price of admission. Then you spend a morning exploring upstream, deep into the gulch, before heading back to the confluence for lunch and continuing downriver toward Big Spring.

You find swimming holes and little waterfalls in the middle of a desert. (In a desert!)

You encounter quicksand – real quicksand, the kind where your foot sinks and the river bottom grabs and your hiking partner has to help pull you out, and everyone is laughing and slightly terrified and covered in mud.

You walk past petroglyphs and remnants of civilizations that predate anything in your frame of reference. There are sites along the Paria that are too meaningful and too fragile to write about here, but I can tell you that standing in front of them recalibrated my sense of time in a way that no mountain summit ever has.

And sometimes the desert reminds you who’s in charge. On one of my last Paria trips, I was guiding a group and had prepared crème brûlée as a surprise dessert at our final camp. I had just torched the sugar when the sky opened up. The river started to rise – that part we expected. What we did not expect was the massive waterfall that materialized off the cliffside a quarter mile upstream, sending water down a drainage that ran directly through our camp. What followed was two hours of frenzied tent relocation in the dark – hauling gear to higher ground while water poured in from a direction we hadn’t planned for. Once everyone was finally resettled on safe ground, soaked and wide-eyed, I made the rounds – and served crème brûlée. The pot had survived the flood, lidded and floating, bobbing around in the current like it had somewhere better to be. The custard was perfect. The desert didn’t care.

I’ve been guiding professionally for years now, in places that are objectively bigger, higher, more remote, more extreme. I’ve stood on top of things and at the bottom of things and in the middle of things that would make reasonable people nervous. The Paria Canyon is none of those things, technically. It’s right here – 45 minutes from my house in Kanab, accessible from a dirt road, on BLM land that anyone with a permit can walk.

And it is the wildest place I know.

Not wild in the sense of dangerous (though it can be), and not wild in the sense of untouched (though it mostly is). Wild in the sense that it still surprises me. Every single time. The river is different, the light is different, the group is different, and I am different. I keep going back expecting to feel like I’ve seen it all, and instead I find another swimming hole I’d forgotten, another conversation I didn’t expect, another moment where the canyon walls close in and the rest of the world simply ceases to be relevant.