It took no time at all to get up Cardenas Creek and back to the Escalante Route and from there it took about 45 minutes to get up to the ruin overlooking the Colorado River and the Unkar Creek delta on the other side. We spent about half of an hour up there, checking out the ruin and some artifacts, and taking lots of photos before continuing on.

Our second stop of the morning was taken about 2 miles further on at a nameless drainage between Cardenas Creek and Escalante Creek. That was right around 10am and we were already about halfway through the hiking for the day so I was feeling better about getting to camp reasonably early. Chris and I spent some time chasing a spiny desert lizard around there trying to get some photos.

Shortly after leaving that rest stop I happened across a collared lizard which was even more exciting for me as I really love collards. I got a couple of good shots of it before it scampered off and sadly that was the only one we saw for the entire trip. We saw lots of the smaller lizards but not very many of the larger ones.

We reached our highest elevation of the day, the west end of the ridge just north of Escalante Creek, around 1230 and took a break for lunch there. Now we were about two-thirds through the days hiking and I figured on about 2 more hours to camp.

I was a little off on my estimate and it was only about 1.5 hours to camp and we arrived there just after 230pm. It felt good to get back there as I had some nice memories of camping on the beach during my trip back in 2007. I remembered the beach as being a lot wider back then and there seemed to have been quite a bit of erosion.

We had the beach to ourselves again this time and had a nice afternoon and evening. After dinner we enjoyed some cocktails while waiting for night to fall. It was a cloudy afternoon and there were some showers later in the day so I ended up wrapping my sleeping pad, bag and backpack up under my tarp just in case it rained some more overnight.