Painted Canyon

What it's like to hike California's Painted Canyon, one of the world's most unusual geologic wonders

Grant Marek

Imagine for a second that the Earth is a giant cake. 

Painted Canyon — an awe-inducing section of the Mecca Hills Wilderness an hour from Palm Springs — is what it would look like if you drove a knife through 600 million years worth of natural history, and pulled a slice out.

Formed by the convergence of the San Andreas Fault’s two massive plates, it’s part of one of the most unusual geologic formations of its kind in the world (which there are a lot of on the outskirts of the high desert). A varicolored badlands labyrinth, it feels like a cross between the canyon that leads to the Grail Temple in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” and a menagerie of National Park wonders.

Everywhere you turn, there’s some stupid beautiful geologic marvel: towering boulder faces that make you feel like you’re in Yosemite, unreal cone formations that look like they were plucked right out of New Mexico’s Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, or a matrix of water-carved canyons that rival Arizona’s magical Antelope Slot.

And in some cases, the geologic marvels are stacked one on top of another — you can very literally see what looks like very distinct fault line events.

I’m just here for the ladders though.

It’s early on a Thursday morning in April when I pull up to the trailhead with my brother-in-law Mike after rumbling down 5 miles worth of harrowingly bumpy dirt roads on the outskirts of an agriculture town.

We finally roll to a stop at the trailhead in a makeshift desert parking lot with only a couple of other cars in it, and head out on foot into the canyon. Mashed rocks crunch underneath our feet as we trudge through a creepy quiet canyon that gets narrower and then wider and then narrower and then wider, until breaking off into a natural maze of small, steep slots that you’d probably never be able to traverse were it not for the ladders.

The first time I hiked Painted Canyon 17 years ago, some of the canyons still had wooden ladders that were varying degrees of dangerous (mostly the You Could Maybe Die If You Climb This degree), but those have since all been replaced entirely by aluminum ones.

I make my way safely up the first pair we encounter in the canyon and am sort of overcome by this feeling of cheating the system: climbing a decidedly not natural thing in a decidedly natural place to reach a place you wouldn’t otherwise be able to hike.

It’s like getting a backstage pass to nature.

The Mecca Hills Wilderness became part of the now over 109 million acre National Wilderness Preservation System in 1994, and the Bureau of Land Management oversees the 26,356-acre recreation area, but based on the three different times I’ve been there in three different decades, they don’t oversee it very often.

When I went in 2010 with my dad, who hiked the entire thing in jeans (we were not an outdoors family growing up), we found extra ladders that led nowhere, and on this morning’s drive into the canyon with Mike, we passed at least one aluminum ladder that was somehow folded over, like it was a prop from a Hulk movie.

Today, we make our way up only a small number of ladders, having missed one very important landmark at the beginning of a hike that otherwise doesn’t have any signage.

Missing that Giant Rock Arrow meant instead of a 5-mile loop through the rest of the ladder-filled labyrinth (which are really the best parts), we did an 8-mile, reception-less hike into the Mojave desert where we spent most of the time convincing ourselves that the screenshot we had of the trail map was kinda mimicking the giant wash we were wandering through.

“It looks like there are lots of footprints here; we’re definitely going the right way,” we said over and over again.

Except we weren’t, and discovered as much when I got a single cell phone bar back that revealed we were on the clear other side of the hills.

If you don’t miss the Giant Rock Arrow, though, you’ll weave your way through the cool, shaded, steep-walled canyon (which’ll make even the hottest desert day bearable), get assists from both ladders and ropes along the way, and finally pop out on the top, where you’ll get a pretty fantastic view of Mecca Hills.

In short, there's a natural wonder in the high desert that needs to be seen to be believed, but be sure to bring lots of water, keep an eye on the rock arrow, and, of course, enjoy the cake.