Old Cream Cellar Road Hike - Escalante, UT
October 11, 2026. Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Exploring the top section of the Cream Cellar Road - the next day we hiked the lower section - read that here.
The light drizzle of rain slowly ratchets up to an absolute downpour, and I laugh as a gust of wind drives the droplets noisily against my raincoat’s hood. At my feet, the rain is both coming down and bouncing back up, and the spray is swept over the curve of the golden hued slickrock. My Dad and I are descending from the top of a massive mesa into a basin below, and the storm arrived at the perfect moment to watch waterfalls spring to life within minutes.
It’s a flash flood in miniature, viewed from a safe location we’d chosen knowing these conditions were a very real possibility.
The path we’re following is an old roadway, the Cream Cellar Road, built way back around 1924. In this region the enterprising communities of people (most likely Mormon settlers) needed ways to move themselves, goods, and mail between the towns of Escalante and Boulder. One of these routes cuts directly across the rugged terrain and goes in and out of a large canyon called Death Hollow - the Boulder Mail Trail (used by the mail carriers as well, my favorite note about this route was that energetic teenagers would make this roughly 15 mile trek one way to go dance with folks in the next town over).
The Cream Cellar Road however, was more gentle and less direct. It was used by mule trains and postal service from 1924 to 1940, and the name comes from the 5 gallon pails of cream that were transported from Boulder dairy farmers to Escalante and Bryce Valley. Remnants of the road are easy to follow once you know what to look for - retaining walls built to hold the road bed up, red dirt transported to smooth out the top and fill in low spots, cut-in areas where bedrock was chiseled away to make a slope into a more gentle angle, and even gouges from steel wheels. The road was decommissioned when the Civilian Conservation Corps completed the “Million Dollar Highway” aka Highway 12, which is now the smooth and utterly scenic road through the region.
It is also important to note that these routes were not pioneered by the settler townfolk. Instead, the new people in the region followed the trade and travel routes established and trodden by the indigenous communities and peoples for many, many generations and across different populations.
Hiking the Cream Cellar Road is a fun adventure as we wander through history still visible, think about the work to create it. And, it’s an engaging route finding puzzle in a few brief spots to find the winding route through the slickrock and sandy flats. We explored the best preserved section of the road over a couple days, as we wanted short hikes given the terrible weather.
The northern end of the road is easily found via a pull-off on the side of Highway 12 just before you drop down toward the Head of the Rocks Overlook (roughly opposite the cell tower atop a reddish rocky promontory). There’s safe parking just off the road as well. From there, cross the yellow cattle grate and follow the use trail immediately to the right. The faint path winds around some trees, but it’s there, and as always, please keep an eye out for the fragile cryptobiotic soil (it looks like wee little castles or bumpy greyish ground) that is destroyed by footprints. Always walk on already established paths, on rock, loose sand, or down a waterway / wash where we always find safe spots to step.
Follow the use path over a dark red patch of earth, and then just a little bit later, look to your left- there you’ll see the remnants of the namesake cream cellar - now a fallen-down pile of logs atop earth. At this point the old road is straight ahead- start looking for the telltale reddish dirt and red blocks of stone along the left edge. From here, the road is quite easy to follow all the way down to the basin below. It makes a big switchback, and descents around 400 feet.
It was on these switchbacks that we found ourselves in the middle of a proper “gully washer” storm as these heavy rains were sometimes called. Hurricane Rachel along the US coast is spinning a ton of moisture inland, and this very dramatic weather system is the result of that disturbance. This isn’t the first time we’ve experienced heavy rain in the area, and one of the reasons we chose this hike was that we knew it was safe in the event of rain - no slot canyons or large washes that could become impassable, and we knew from prior trips that this specific basin only drains a small area, so any water that does arrive quickly recedes.
If you’ve never hiked in canyon country before, always remember that flash floods are a possibility even if the rain occurs far away - this landscape is vast, and drainages can extend for many many miles beyond where you are hiking. Even if it looks clear overhead, never venture into canyons, especially slots, if any rain is forecast. I also want to acknowledge that it is a privilege to be out here hiking, and choosing to be out in bad weather with a safe and warm place to return to, when others across the country and world experience inclement weather and it is not a choice.
Watching the storm arrive in this basin, even though we’ve seen it before, was amazing and humbling and exhilarating. Within 2-3 minutes of the hard rain starting the slickrock turned silver with water, and then the waterfalls began. Like someone turned on the spigots of a basin-wide bathtub, every crack and draw was suddenly alive with water. Alongside the cream cellar road five little falls appeared, with clear water sluicing over the trail until they combined below into larger waterways.
The peak of the rain passed quickly, and then we were free to ramble around the bottom of the slickrock basin. We hopped over a small creek and looked at how the water moved from one area to the next. We marveled at the bright saturated colors of the slickrock - so much more vibrant when wet! I followed the contours of the lichen at my feet, amazed at the small world of color and pattern and life on this tiny scale.
Amazingly, the sun then came out as puffy clouds wandered overhead. With drenched rain gear we were happy for the chance to wander around in the now clement weather - it is always amazing how quickly it goes from torrential downpour to sunny and almost warm. We stopped for a long snack, admiring the view and pointing out gleaming silver puddles that sparkled on every flat area as far as we could see. We’d be back tomorrow to explore the lower part of the road, and could see the new terrain below.
Knowing our good fortune with the sun would not last, we headed back up the hill, appreciating the remnants of the road on the return journey. I didn’t have any time to paint today thanks to the variable weather, so I took lots of photos of everything that interested me, from the road cuts to bright stone that held all the colors of a sunset to a friendly raven that quorked at us from a telephone pole before flying off to get a drink from a puddle.
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