Shoutout to many users posting trip reports for "off the beaten" track places, including kidz won't hike and Birb! To give back to the community, here is my trip report in which I inadvertently advance the "state of the art" knowledge on the "trail", or rather, the absolute absence of trail or passage, deep inside the Umtanum Creek Canyon.
My plan was to do a loop hike, and you can see the loop as executed in one of the pictures of my route below. I would start at Umtanum Recreation Site, take the Vista trail to climb out onto the Umtanum Ridge Crest, then go west along the ridge, then go off-trail and drop into the Umtanum Creek Canyon, then take the "trail" that I saw on the map via the canyon back to the trailhead.
The first and middle parts of the trip went great - Vista trail up the crest was awesome, I loved the views from the top, and I loved the ridge hike as well. Sure, it was a road walk, but still, I found it so relaxing to walk the ridge, have awesome views along both sides, and have almost completely solitude (there were 2 folks in a buggy at some point but that was it in terms of seeing anyone). I won't go much into detail here since there are many trip reports on this part.
Then as the route shows, I went off-trail/road and descended into the Umtanum Creek Canyon. Most of the descent was fun and enjoyable, I had no problems and I did not feel unsafe at any point. I actually enjoyed this because it gave me a feeling of even more being "out there". I dreamed about pitching a tent here or there and imagining the solitude.
The final part of descent into the Umtanum Creek Canyon was a bit more gnarly, because the contributing canyon walls started narrowing around the tiny creek bed that I was going through, and the creek bed itself was full of bushes. But I had expected this segment to have some bushwhacking because I could see the foliage from the satellite and I've bushwhacked through creekbeds surrounded by narrow slopes before.
The problem was that once I dropped into the Umtanum Creek Canyon, I had expected that I would simply cruise out on the "trail" which I saw on the map. I did check out trip reports for Umtanum Ridge Crest in advance of the trip, but not for Umtanum Creek Canyon Trail. The point at which I dropped into the canyon is 3.8 mi from the trailhead. Well, had I checked out the trip reports for the Canyon trail, I would have seen people writing "the trail disappears/becomes overgrown/difficult at 1.5 mi", i.e. more than 2 full miles before the point at which I dropped into the canyon.
I did not know that of course, I was naively trying to find a trail, then I figured out that there was in fact no trail at the point at which I dropped in. I had to bushwhack through the creek bed with a lot of dense bushes and/or scramble on the rocks on the sides interchangeably, and honestly, I don't recommend anyone else doing this. It's not that it was dangerous, it wasn't, the problem was that it was 3:30PM on 31 October and I was progressing at a glacial pace due to having to do foot by foot route finding and often having to backtrack, not the 20 minutes/mile pace I was planning on. I tried many things, including a somewhat desperate idea at one point of walking in the creek itself, simply because it has no foliage inside. But eventually I decided to scramble up on one side of the canyon, sometimes steep, but having no foliage, and at some point I found what I thought looked like a very overgrown trail. As I followed it, it became more and more established, and eventually I was pretty confident this was a trail at some point in the past, and gladly followed it out, until it became well defined and a decent regular trail, probably around the 1.5 mi from the trailhead point.
So anyway, that's it, the bottom line is that the trail is non-existent deeper inside the canyon. I do think it's still a fun trip if that's what you're expecting, are planning for it time-wise, and have experience bushwhacking and scrambling. I think had I not had the time issue on my hands and had I come into the canyon from the trailhead, knowing that I can always backtrack the way I came (instead of not knowing what lies ahead of me as was my case), I'd quite enjoy the route finding!
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