Labyrinth Canyon Canoe on the Green River

Overview

There are no rapids in Labyrinth Canyon — that is the whole point. For five days the Green River carries your canoe at walking pace through a sandstone trench of deepening reds and golds, and the hardest thing you do all day is choose a camp among the cottonwoods. This is desert paddling as meditation: herons lifting off sandbars, canyon wrens spiralling song down the walls, side hikes to arches and fur trapper Denis Julien's 1836 inscription. The centrepiece is Bowknot Bend, seven miles of river looping a mesa to arrive a few hundred metres from where it started; climb the saddle and you see both reaches at once. Powell named the canyon on his 1869 descent, and remarkably little has changed since. Put in at Ruby Ranch and take out at Mineral Bottom, where a shuttle grinds up to Moab — or continue into Stillwater Canyon for the jet-boat pickup above the Colorado confluence. A free BLM permit, fire pan and pack-out toilet are mandatory; hire and shuttles from Moab bring a self-guided trip in around £520. The variables: no drinking water in the canyon, spring winds that can blow a canoe upstream, and summer heat that makes April-May and September-October the sane seasons.

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Prefilled for 1 October 2026 — the next best-season window. Search on partner sites — opens in a new tab.