Indigenous Cultures
Canyon of the Long Skinny Creature
Sunday, March 19th, 2023: Hikes, Indigenous Cultures, Lower Box, Society, Southwest New Mexico.
After last week’s false spring, our weather got cold and wet again. I’d done a midweek hike on a muddy trail and wasn’t up for any more of that.
And after last week’s Arizona pictograph hike, I’d done some more research on the “high desert” area along the border, a large, remote region I’d previously ignored. There weren’t any trails there, but there were some buttes I could probably bushwhack, and by chance I learned about a canyon with petroglyphs. It would require an overland approach in unfamiliar terrain, and I couldn’t actually tell if the canyon itself was passable, but I’d give it a try.
I expected the petroglyph hike to be short, so afterward I hoped to drive north to the buttes and get some real mileage and elevation in.
There was frost on my windshield when I left the house – really unusual for this time of year. And our windy season starts in March – we were forecast to get gusts in the 40s.
The sky was mostly clear with high clouds. It took me an hour to reach the turnoff onto the first dirt road – as usual my topo map had it mislabeled, so I wasted 10 or 15 minutes looking for it. Once on the right road, I passed a Fish & Game truck, then found the next turn, onto a winding, high-clearance ranch road that turned out to be in terrible shape, with dozens of washouts. That road took me over a low rise, then down into the broad alluvial valley of our famous river. The road was so bad I averaged less than 15 mph.
Then I reached the final turn, onto a dirt track that hadn’t been driven in a year or more. It was even worse than the previous one – there were parts I could’ve walked faster than I drove. But I continued, through an old wire-and-branch gate that had almost dry-rotted apart, until I finally reached a dry wash where the track completely disappeared.
My topo map showed a couple of major tributaries approaching the canyon from this direction. I was hoping this dry wash was one of them, and sure enough, I immediately found the tracks of recent hikers. They’d come down the wash from much farther east – like the vast majority of urban hikers, they were probably driving a Subaru or some other low-clearance vehicle that couldn’t handle the track I drove.
I figured it would be a little over a mile to the main canyon. I was walking in deep, dry sand, which is no fun, but at this latitude and elevation, I was surrounded by familiar plants – honey mesquite, catclaw acacia, and best of all, really healthy creosote bush – so I almost felt like I was back home in the Mojave. I had to keep slowing down – my normal pace doesn’t work in sand.
This tributary, cut through alluvial deposits, finally reached a bedrock layer of conglomerate where it tightened and dropped through a slot. Around a few more bends and I was at the main canyon.
The main canyon started shallow and wide, but as it twisted back and forth it soon got deeper, and I reached a broad central area featuring old cottonwoods, living and dead. Water appeared flowing on the surface, green with algae.
Past there, it began to feel more like the canyons of Utah, with tilted strata rising from underground, water running over sculpted bedrock, and finally a slot canyon, where I had to climb down several short pouroffs.
Past the slot canyon, I carefully picked my way across a long, flood-sculpted ledge and found myself at the edge of an overhang, looking down at a deep emerald pool.
The ledge ended in a sort of ramp that I shuffled down on my butt. And turning to look at the pool, I discovered the first petroglyph panel, in a niche of a boulder overhanging the water.
Walking down the canyon from the pool, I immediately saw another petroglyph panel at the base of an outcrop on my right. To my left, high above the wash, I spotted a big white petroglyph at the base of cliffs. And straight ahead was the river, muddy and racing along in flood.
I walked toward the end of the wash, but soon got bogged down in mud. So I began climbing the left slope toward the petroglyph I’d seen above. The surface was a sort of flaky, treacherous shale dotted with catclaw.
The first thing I noticed was that there were two layers of carvings, one ancient, patinated, and dim, and the other much more recent, in high-contrast white. Unfortunately I’d arrived at noon, and the sun was casting a shadow that divided the panel. So I ate lunch and waited for the shadow to move.
What I was most interested in was the left side of the main panel. There were two tall images in parallel – a sort of ladder, spine, or trunk with branches, and what looked like a long skinny lizard with the head of a bird wearing horns like a sheep. They were obviously designed together to convey a single message.
From my lofty perch, I watched hawks wheeling on thermals over the riparian corridor. This whole valley is a wildlife sanctuary and wilderness study area, and is known for its exceptional bird diversity. But the more time I spent up there, the more I noticed the lichen.
Finally I got the shadow and pictures I wanted, and made my way back down, to check out the smaller panel across the wash. It had the same two layers, likely separated by thousands of years. So-called “rock art” is mostly ignored by scientists, and relegated to amateurs, who divide it into regional and temporal styles. But indigenous people recognize it as writing, and the rock writing I’ve seen is a continuum spanning the West, sharing a common vocabulary.
A gale-force wind was blowing straight up the canyon as I started back. I had to lean into it.
The wind was a little less harsh when I turned off into the tributary wash. There, I began to pay more attention to the year’s first wildflowers.
When I finally reached the vehicle, I discovered I’d spent 3-1/2 hours on a 4-1/2 mile hike. That’s partly because I was walking in soft sand, which probably requires 50% more energy than walking on a hard surface. It’d also taken me an hour to drive 9 miles on those bad roads. So there was no time left for a hike in the buttes to the north. But I drove up there anyway, and found that my map again had the roads mislabeled, so I couldn’t find the one I needed.
I arrived home after being gone for 8 hours, most of which was driving. And as soon as I got out of the vehicle I could smell the creosote bushes, which had scraped my fenders and doors on that abandoned track. Best thing I’d smelled in months!
Friday, June 2nd, 2023: 2023 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
Day three was my birthday, and I wanted to avoid driving, so I just relaxed in my room, writing about day two and trying to figure out what to do next. On the dozen or so previous visits I’d made to this region, I’d seen all the famous and easily-accessed petroglyph and pictograph sites. More remote “rock art” locations used to be shown on AAA maps, until it became obvious that the general public saw this as an invitation to vandalize.
Since then, people who care about these artifacts have generally avoided publishing their locations. In addition to climate change, the spread of invasive species, and the breakdown of local communities, vandalism is one of the many tragic consequences of our mechanically-enhanced mobility. Giving random strangers access to the locations of prehistoric sites truly is an invitation to vandalize in a society with such poor social controls as ours. And if you care about these things, you really should get to know and establish trust with the local people who know where they are, before even thinking about looking for them.
But for this trip I’d been able to round up a few online accounts of lesser-known sites, written not by enthusiasts but by ordinary off-road adventurers. I’d printed those at home, and now in my room I laid them out on the spare bed, along with the relevant maps.
Usually I schedule trips to avoid holiday traffic and crowds, but my birthday fell on Memorial Day weekend this year, and day four was pretty much the big day, the Sunday before the holiday when most travelers would be packing up and heading home. My Sunday destination was a big canyon south of town which I’d somehow never noticed before, and which one of the adventurers said had “a lot of rock art”. A high-clearance 4wd track winds down it for about twenty miles from the highway to a river crossing, past which the track continues eastward. I had no hope of fording the river, but hoped to find a campsite and spend the night. I had no idea what the conditions would be like or how far my vehicle would get on what would likely be a difficult road.
After turning onto the back road, the first thing I found, even before the track entered the canyon itself, was a monster pickup truck and a huge travel trailer, detached, parked in a stark roadside clearing. I assumed the owners were out exploring in their UTV. I’ve always had trouble finding campsites in this region because most clearings are designed as parking areas for RVs, right beside the road, since people who travel with their own self-enclosed homes have less need for isolation.
I rattled and bounced across a rolling plateau for about three miles until the road finally wound down into the canyon proper, where I found a place to pull over. The author of the online report hadn’t given site locations so I wanted to check upstream on foot before driving ahead.
I walked nearly a half mile upcanyon but saw nothing promising. This is BLM land, open range, and I found occasional old cowpies throughout the day, but nothing recent.
The canyon was already awe-inspiring, and it became more so the farther I went. Suddenly I rounded a bend and saw a spread of brilliant green ahead – a stand of cottonwoods. I came to a sidetrack that led up a sandy bank into a small grove, and behind it was a cliff that looked promising.
Rock writers in sandstone country typically made use of sheer cliffs that were darkly patinated and free of drainage from above. When you’re looking for sites, you look for smooth, shiny cliffs that are free of water streaking and are reachable by human hands. Sometimes they’re elevated dozens of feet above the canyon bottom, requiring field glasses to spot, followed by a steep climb up a boulder-strewn debris slope.
I drove up onto the sand bank, and soon saw the petroglyphs. It was a nice site, but sadly vandalized with prominent graffiti – names and initials are the typical product of Anglos with limited imaginations and boundless egos. There was a perfect campsite here, so I memorized the location in case I didn’t find a better one downstream.
I soon came to running water, and a pool full of tadpoles. I pulled over for a young couple driving up canyon in a small side-by-side UTV – obviously the owners of the big truck and huge trailer I’d passed near the highway. Their monthly payments for all these toys could exceed my Social Security income!
Past sweeping bends beneath towering cliffs, I was driving slowly and craning my neck from side to side, glassing for likely sites, and I finally spotted a second site, about fifty feet up a debris slope. It was on a series of barely patinated, eroded, and stained rock faces – not the best surfaces for preservation – but because it required a climb, it had escaped vandalism by lazy white folks.
Downstream, I found more water and more lush vegetation, driving through a shallow pool then encountering a muddy one about forty feet long whose depth I couldn’t determine, so I stopped. I heard an engine approaching from behind, so I backed up, and the young couple whizzed past again on their UTV, splashing through the big pool, which reached their floorboard. Too deep for me!
It was lunchtime, but the canyon was narrow here, and I had to roll a heavy boulder out of the way to make a parking space off the roadway. Then I heard an engine approaching from downstream, and climbed up the bank to watch them drive through the big pool. It was a lifted pickup with big tires, and the water reached the axles – well over a foot deep.
I was making a sandwich out of the back of my vehicle when the young people passed a third time. They laughed and said they’d dropped a phone down-canyon and had to return to get it. One of the hazards of riding in an open vehicle. I congratulated them on finding it. Definitely not a day for solitude in a remote canyon.
Just as I was preparing to carry my lunch up to the shade of a cliff, an outlandish vehicle approached from up canyon – a “rock bouncer”, the ultimate evolution of the old dune buggy, with a lifted suspension, fully exposed frame with cargo bed in back, widened track, and giant tires. These still-rare contraptions, inspired by NASA and the Road Warrior movie, are the most extreme and capable off-road vehicles ever made – something you take where your Jeep, Hummer, ATV or dirt bike can’t go. In it was a friendly couple, probably in their early sixties, who had no idea where they were or where they were going, and asked if I had a map. Of course I was loaded with maps, including detailed topo printouts for this canyon, all of which the woman photographed with her phone.
Their RV was parked just off the highway at the foot of the high mountains, about twenty miles south. They were from Grand Junction, Colorado, “thirty minutes from the Utah desert”. They used to haul their boat to Lake Powell south of here, but were now more into backcountry exploring, and like almost everyone who visits these areas now, they base themselves in their RV and explore in their open off-road vehicle. Their goal was just to drive as far as possible all day on back roads, avoiding the highway, returning to “camp” by different routes if possible, so my maps were a great help. I warned them there was a river crossing at the mouth of this canyon, and the river was likely in flood.
After lunch, I had to climb and follow a ledge for several hundred yards to get past the deep pool. Back down on the rocky road, it was a hot day to be walking exposed under the sun, with cliff swallows swooping and crying overhead, the cliffs and rock outcrops approaching and receding over and over, as I rounded the never-ending sweeping bends, glassing for petroglyph panels above.
I climbed through a grove of cottonwoods and partway up a debris slope without finding anything, when I heard more engines coming up canyon. They passed below me, oblivious, a convoy of nine vehicles led by what looked like a boxy, repurposed game warden truck, followed by various Jeep Wranglers, Toyota FJs, and lifted pickups, and ending with a stock Toyota Highlander, which I was amazed could ford the deep pool. Then I descended and continued down canyon until I spotted the next site.
This one required a more precarious climb, but had been attacked anyway by enterprising white vandals. Nor was it as interesting as the earlier panels.
I continued downstream, but the canyon became wider and the cliffs taller, with debris skirts over a hundred and fifty feet high. I glassed promising, darkly patinated rock faces but could find nothing up there, I had no shade and it was getting hot, and I kept having to climb out of the track to let off-road vehicles pass, so I finally gave up. On the bright side, I’d encountered very few flies, despite the warmth, old cattle sign, and abundance of water. That original shaded campsite was beckoning – hopefully no one else had taken it yet.
As I walked back, I pondered my goal for these trips. Looking for more obscure prehistoric sites, I’m destined to reach a point where my vehicle can’t proceed and I need to walk miles on sun-exposed canyon roads, passed by UTVs and lifted pickups full of oblivious explorers. Is this really how I want to spend my time in nature?
Even if I had a more capable vehicle, that would just mean more driving time and less hiking time. Maybe I should be looking for better hikes, closer to the highway, instead of better prehistoric sites, and give up on the really remote stuff requiring long backcountry drives.
I reached my parked vehicle just ahead of the couple from Grand Junction. They’d crossed the flooded river – it reached the floorboard of their rock bouncer, which was waist-high for me – exploring for an hour or so toward the Maze district of Canyonlands. I said I’d been looking for rock art, and they were surprised, as if they’d never considered any purpose for being here other than driving. So I tried to describe how to find the site I was hoping to camp at.
They were admiring the petroglyphs and bemoaning the vandalism when I arrived. “Why do people destroy things they don’t understand?” the woman cried. “Big question,” I answered, and the man grinned sadly, shaking his head. I actually think it’s complicated, with almost as many answers as there are vandals. In the old days, ranchers and cowboys likely saw the Indians as barbarians and prehistoric artifacts as the work of Godless heathens. Today’s young people have been abused by a dysfunctional society and are as likely to destroy as to create. I’d chanced upon a professional rock art website the day before and learned one of the most spectacular and well-known panels on the San Rafael Swell, north of here, had recently been defaced, so although most of the vandalism I’d seen today was historic, the problem is just as bad now, after generations of what we call “education”.
We talked pleasantly for a while, comparing our hometowns and favorite haunts – they said they lived in paradise but loved the desert too, and were hungry for information about this area. They said they’d been snowed on in the mountains last night, while I was sleeping my motel room below, in town. They said they had to drive home tomorrow, and I mentioned I was retired. They said that was hopefully only a few years away for them, but with all their investment in toys, I wondered how soon they’d really be financially secure. A rig like theirs – truck, trailer, and rock bouncer – could cost well over $200,000, and when combined with a home mortgage, the monthly payments could postpone retirement indefinitely. They do save the cost of motel rooms, which for me can amount to $1,500 a year. But I’m guessing for many people I encountered that day, expensive toys would become a burden.
The sun was still high, so I filled my shower bag and left it on a rock to warm up while enjoying an early beer. Then I noticed a couple of cottonwoods separated by the perfect distance for my hammock – I’d had to replace my original Yucatan hammock after the house fire, and this would be the first test of the replacement.
That shower was wonderful and it felt great to be clean again and wearing clean clothes. Vehicles kept passing but I was screened by cottonwoods. I lit my oil lantern and made dinner after sunset, had an unusual second beer, and sat out under the light of the high half moon, admiring it and Venus, which was setting in the west. I had bad double vision, but it varied from minute to minute and I could sometimes reduce it by concentrating. In a tiny vehicle I’d paid $4,000 cash for, I’d carried everything I needed to be safe and comfortable outdoors. I would sleep out under the stars, the way I was taught.
I can enjoy nature in the daytime without leaving my home. But when I go camping, I want to recapture the experience of my ancestors, to adapt to and learn from new natural habitats both day and night. I spent much of my life learning the skills required to live simply outdoors, and I’m still learning – why would I want to give up that priceless achievement now? Why would anyone need to haul a familiar kitchen, bath, and bedroom with to them into the backcountry? It reminds me of the big box chain, Camping World, that specializes in RVs, trailers, and accessories. That’s not camping to me.
Finally I went to bed, and tossed and turned in the hammock for several hours. It’d been a few years since I’d slept in one, my back condition had been getting worse, and I’d settled into a habit of sleeping on my stomach, which isn’t possible in a hammock. It was 11:30 when bright lights suddenly hit the crowns of the trees above me. The light bounced around, then I heard a dog barking. I looked over at the sandy trail that led to my campsite, and saw a truck approaching slowly, a middle-aged woman walking beside it, and a big dog running toward me, barking. I yelled that the site was occupied, but the dog ran right up to my hammock, jumping and barking hysterically. I yelled to the woman, and she ran up to me and grabbed the dog. Without apologizing, she returned to the truck and with difficulty, they backed out.
I swore to bring “Occupied” signs to post at the access points on future trips. Giving up on the hammock experiment, I used a flashlight to find a level spot, unpacked my tarp, sleeping pad, sleeping bag, and pillow, and finally got to sleep well after midnight.
Friday, June 2nd, 2023: 2023 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
I woke well-rested in my beautiful campsite, as more UTV riders passed up and down the remote canyon in early morning. The plan for the day was to head north, stopping briefly to check out a couple of modest but better known sites near the highway before making a longer drive into unfamiliar backcountry, hoping for another good campsite in preparation for a canyon hike the next day.
The first stop was a pictograph site located near a popular state park designed for off-roaders of all kinds. They were all naturally avoiding the pictographs and unloading their UTVs, ATVs, and dirt bikes to raise dust and sand in a roar of engines.
This small panel in the ancient “Barrier Canyon” style has severely decayed due to natural erosion. It was lunchtime so I made a sandwich before heading north again.
Not long after, I joined the westbound interstate for about three miles, signalling far in advance and carefully making an abrupt right turn onto a gravel road with big rigs barreling past me at 80 mph. This road leads into a spectacular narrow canyon with towering walls where I abruptly came upon a big family group of adults and kids who’d arrived on dirt bikes and UTVs and were noisily climbing around in the shade of a huge, shaded stone alcove where water oozed out of the base of the cliff in a profusion of ferns. There was one kid tottering around in bike helmet and full body armor who couldn’t have been older than three.
It turned out that this was not the pictograph site, so I parked and walked a short distance to the next bend, where I saw a pictograph panel under a smaller overhang, at the base of a tall sunlit cliff. All these publicized sites had fences to prevent vehicle access, but the fences had trails leading behind them for a closer look on foot.
This site was called the Black Dragon, but I couldn’t see what the name referred to. Maybe it was farther down the canyon and I missed it? Still, these paintings in the heart of the Barrier Canyon “stylistic region” were done in a completely different, seemingly abstract style – much more like what we have in the Mojave. In any event there were too many people there today – other vehicles passed me several times.
I rejoined the interstate and headed west across the “Swell”, past constantly changing canyons and formations, and finally down the other side, where I took an unfamiliar shortcut on my way north. There were high snow-draped mountains in the western distance, and this road started by following one of the creeks that drain that range, all of which are raging torrents now, gray with sediment.
The back road I wanted led east from a small farming town – I stopped there for gas and motor oil to top up my engine. Here I found the core of the UTV culture that’s taking over the rural west. The extra-wide streets had been repurposed for UTVs, speed limits were set to 25 and UTVs had the right of way, so if you wanted to drive through town, you had to creep behind them as the drivers waved to each other and defiantly ignored you. They kept their cars and trucks parked at home, reserved for highway driving.
I’d printed complicated directions on backcountry roads to the edge of the remote canyon which “should be better known for its high quality petroglyph panels”. These directions led me past heavily irrigated alfalfa fields, grazing cattle, and dilapidated or outright ruined Mormon farmhouses – the poorest I’d ever seen. The gravel road climbed a plateau, then descended through a maze of gray canyons, eventually emerging onto a red clay plateau to a crossroads. All along the way, big roadside clearings were occupied by parked pickup trucks with empty UTV trailers, and at one point I met a group of teenagers on dirt bikes.
I came to a Y junction and took the left branch, which had been rained on and driven while the clay was wet, leaving deep crisscrossing ruts in a rock-hard surface which went on for a couple of miles.
Cattle were grazing along the clay road, fifteen miles from any ranch. I came to another Y and climbed another plateau, finally reaching a wooden fence and the rim of the 600 foot deep canyon.
I followed the rim, on a fairly rough and hazardous clay and bedrock road, to the trailhead, and past, where campsites had been promised. There turned out to be only one, totally exposed on the very rim of the canyon. I unpacked and set up my shower bag to warm in the sun. A wind came up, and got steadily stronger, becoming a full gale across the rim.
As an experiment, I tried spreading and anchoring my tarp, but even with a continuous line of heavy rocks it still ballooned out in the middle. I tried to warm up leftovers for dinner, but had to enclose my stove in the back of the vehicle and wait over a half hour for the pot to warm in the crazy wind.
I had about 20 minutes of sunlight left when I finally gave up, after two hours in this ridiculous campsite. I drove six miles back on the road and found another site on an exposed ledge below bluffs. This site had no wind, and I quickly took a cool shower just as the sun set. Tomorrow I would drive back to the canyon rim and hike down into it looking for more petroglyphs.
Monday, June 5th, 2023: 2023 Trips, Colorado Plateau, Indigenous Cultures, Regions, Road Trips, Society.
After the fiasco on the canyon rim, Day Five’s second and final campsite started out warm at sundown, but the temperature plunged throughout the night, so that I had to keep getting up and adding clothes. The one positive was my vision – I’d had bad double vision the previous night, but now I could focus well on both moon and stars. Presumably these constant changes are due to the cataracts.
It was still dark when I woke up freezing in my warm-weather bag, and turning my head eastward saw the faint light of approaching dawn. I knew I couldn’t sleep anymore, so I waited, huddled in the fetal position to conserve body heat, until the sun hit the bluffs to my west.
Then I got up, went to the vehicle and dug out the remainder of my winter clothes. All bundled up with thermal cap, hood, and gloves, I estimated it was well below 40 here at the end of May, at about 5,600 feet elevation. The sun soon reached my campsite, where I made coffee, had breakfast, and began shedding clothes.
I put on my boots and started to pack up for the drive back to the canyon rim, but immediately felt a sharp pain above the outside of my right ankle, so bad I could barely walk and had to remove the boots. These boots have extra ankle support, and I rarely but occasionally get these ankle pains that seem to represent some kind of pressure point. I normally address it with a felt pad over the ankle while hiking, and the pain disappears completely when I put on regular shoes that don’t contact the sensitive area. But this pain was higher up than usual – on the tendon that runs upward from the ankle on the outside of the calf. I wouldn’t be able to hike at all with this kind of pain!
But I changed into sneakers and drove back to the rim, hoping to find a solution once I got there.
At the rim, I first tried adding a felt pad, but that didn’t help at all. Then I tried lacing the boot a couple hooks lower, but that made little difference. So I dug out my Ace bandage. wrapped that around my lower calf, shouldered my pack and started down the trail, but I only made it a hundred yards before having to turn back.
Could I hike in sneakers? Many people do, but the chronic inflammation in my left foot requires extra support. Still, I figured it was worth a try – my sneakers are “stability shoes” with supportive soles, and they have custom orthotics like my hiking boots. I limped back up to the vehicle and switched to the sneakers. But in sneakers, carrying my heavy pack with four liters of water, I only made it a few yards down the steep trail before I realized this wouldn’t work.
I had one last chance. I’d brought my waterproof winter boots in case I had to ford streams, and they have more padding and more hooks for fine-tuning the lacing. When laced all the way up, they caused the same pain, but when I laced the right one as low as possible, so the area around the ankle was free, the pain was much reduced. It still hurt, but I was damned if I would give up.
The trail follows an old road down a steep white clay slope into a network of gullies, which eventually lead to a red clay ledge, where the road ends at an old campsite on a point overlooking the canyon. This whole area is federally designated wilderness, so I’d finally reached a place where no vehicles could bother me!
From the point, you have to find your way down a very steep series of bare rock faces and narrow ledges, sometimes marked by the tracks of many other recent hikers, sometimes marked only by cairns. In places there are several parallel routes, but they all eventually converge. The rocks along the way are fantastic!
Finally I reached the canyon bottom, where the rim trail joins the canyon trail and the surface turns to soft powder sand. I’d seen from above that the canyon was flooded upstream, and now I found out why – a beaver dam!
My ankle pain had completely disappeared, and never returned! It’s got to be a nerve-related pressure point responding to contact with the ankle support built into the boot. It’s a real drag, because these boots are otherwise perfect for me.
The flowers were spectacular down here. I’d brought topo maps for the whole canyon, showing that it looped repeatedly back and forth like a snake for about ten miles northward to the river. Plus I’d brought a much less detailed map printed off the Web, showing roughly where the petroglyphs could be found, with directions. The petroglyph map and directions weren’t very detailed – which of course helps deter vandals – so I missed the first panel completely and overshot by a few hundred yards, crossing the stream a couple of times, before realizing I must’ve missed it.
Returning to the first stream crossing, I still couldn’t seen the petroglyphs from the trail, but noticed a patinated face a hundred and fifty feet above that looked promising, so I began climbing, and was eventually able to make them out.
The online directions said this canyon deserves to be better known for its rock art, which is why I was here in the first place. And this series of panels turned out to be very large and complex. The only problem was weathering – most of the images had become so faint they were hard to see and almost impossible to photograph, especially in the bright light of midday.
One of my readers surprised me by erroneously assuming I haven’t been enhancing these images to make them more readable. I actually do enhance all my petroglyph and pictograph images, but primarily to make them look the way I actually saw them, since I’m almost never able to photograph them in good light, and I’m not proficient enough with cameras to adjust exposure on the spot.
So the images often end up overexposed. Fortunately I’m much more experienced with Photoshop than I am with a camera, so I add contrast and/or saturation afterward as needed to make the photos look the way I saw them. I hate the digital effects used by some rock art photographers to enhance the readability of the images; I only want them to look the way I saw them, in their natural setting.
After leaving the first site I recrossed the creek, working my way around the next bend on a much-trodden trail. But when I approached the third bend and the trail began climbing, I realized that most hikers are using this canyon to access the backpacking trail to the high point of the Swell, about six miles east. The route down the canyon is less used, so there’s no single trail, just a variety of lesser-used routes through dense vegetation that often disappear or become a dead end at a cliff edge.
The next petroglyph panel was supposed to be on the north side of a “rincon”. I’d heard the word but not its meaning; when I came to a huge cove west of the stream with a prominent stone butte in the middle of it, I assumed the butte was the rincon. Getting there wasn’t easy; the stream entered a narrow, sheer-sided stone gap where it was too deep to ford. I had to find a ford upstream, then climb steep banks of loose rubble and sandstone ledges high above the stream to get around the gap. That brought me to the north side of the butte, and a slope which was covered with biological soil crust. I carefully meandered across it on old cattle trails, finding no rock faces suitable for petroglyphs.
Re-checking the directions, I discovered I was supposed to be working my way up a “plain”. I immediately saw the plain below on my right, and when I made my way down there, noticed a small patinated surface at the base of the 300-foot-tall red sandstone cliff.
This had a single panel, featuring bison and a horned figure on horseback, but the left side had exfoliated. Another check of my notes showed that this was that last panel in the canyon, but further back in the big cove I saw cliffs that looked promising and decided to explore that way. I later learned that “rincon” means hidden valley – the whole cove was the rincon.
I did find two sheep petroglyphs back there which the author of the web page had missed. Finally I was discovering something new by myself! But that was it for today – I figured I’d only gone about three miles but it was already mid-afternoon. I didn’t want to spend another night in this area, and to keep my options open I needed to head back to the vehicle now.
Since the directions to the second site had started from the creek below the narrow gap, I went straight down the plain to the creek, and crossed there on steppingstones. I found a trail up the opposite bank, which led to the ledge high above the gap across from where I’d climbed earlier. But the trail ended there at the edge of a cliff. The tracks showed lots of hikers had come up to this dead end – I was the latest.
I had to work my way back down, back across the creek, and through dense, trackless riparian vegetation to get up the opposite ledge and down the other side. The rest was straightforward, just returning the way I’d come.
I’d been dreading the climb out of the canyon, up those tilted ledges of white sandstone under full sun, but that turned out to be the best part of the hike.
I had to drive to the highway the same way I’d come in, so I waited until then to decide where to go next. I was due in California, at the big lake on the Colorado River, in two days. That would be 7-1/2 hours from here by the interstate through Las Vegas, which was the last way I wanted to go. Since I had two days to get there I decided to drive north an hour tonight, to a small town I was familiar with that had a cheap but comfortable motel. The town had little in the way of restaurants but I had plenty to eat in my room.
Next: Days Seven Through Eleven
Vista Home or Desperate Lookout?
Monday, October 28th, 2024: Blue Range, Hikes, Indigenous Cultures, Society, Southwest New Mexico.
I drove two-and-a-quarter hours to the most spectacular viewpoint in our region, and climbed a rocky slope to a prehistoric site. My knee was already hurting from a hike three days earlier, and today’s adventure would add insult to injury. But these are desperate times.
Yet again, we had clear skies and the afternoon high in town was forecast to be at least 80. I’d wanted to explore places at lower elevation but they were forecast to reach 90 – at the end of October! Today’s destination is over 7,000 feet and the temps should be mild.
The drive north used to be one of the loneliest roads in the U.S., but in the past year it’s become some sort of mysterious commuter artery. From where to where, I have no idea, but this morning, most of the southbound vehicles were giant RVs. Tomorrow was forecast to be the last day of our fall heat wave, and it’s as if all the snowbirds decided to head south at the same time.
Finally, I reached the turnoff for the backcountry road west, and left the crowd behind. The single-lane dirt road traverses a maze of ridges and canyons between 6,000 and 6,500 feet, forested with ponderosa pine and Gamble oak, up and down around hairpin turns. RVs, fifth-wheelers, and pickups with camper shells were sporadically tucked away under the pines, and I passed at least one group of camo-clad hunters setting up camp.
The final climb to the high saddle is world-class, emerging from the rolling basin to a south-facing slope with forever views. Parking at the top, I had a chat with a retired couple from the village an hour south. I said this is an undiscovered gem, and they replied “Not anymore!”
As they drove off, I set out on my short hike up to the bluffs. I expected it to be less than half a mile, but the slope gets increasingly steeper and the ground is covered with big sharp rocks. This cliff dwelling is actually marked on Google Maps, but the person who recorded it only viewed it from afar with binoculars. From the road, it looks inaccessible, perched in an alcove way up in a sheer cliff. But you never know until you try.
Picking my way through those rocks was even harder than I expected. But cattle had been all over this area, and I followed their tracks where I could, walking slowly and carefully to protect my knee. At several points I had to climb steep sheets of exposed bedrock, lined with loose rocks that were constantly rolling out from under me. I was ascending an outlying shoulder with a deepening ravine at my left, and I could see that when I reached the foot of the actual bluffs I would need to traverse left up the steep side of the ravine toward the cliff dwelling.
Finally I emerged on a ledge below the bluffs with a 180-degree view of the eastern, southern, and western landscape.
The ledge lies at 7,500 feet and the ravine at my left hosts tall ponderosas and a dense understory of shrubs and grasses hiding bigger and sharper rocks – basically a vegetated talus slope. I had to traverse this upward at the foot of the bluffs – more slow going – but found occasional segments of a narrow trail. I’d entertained fantasies of being the first modern human to explore this site, and still hadn’t seen any footprints.
Finally I emerged from the scrub at the foot of the cliff, with the crumbling wall of the prehistoric structure about twenty feet above me, behind an overhang. The cliff curved outward at right, where a partial, primitive rope ladder was suspended, a dozen feet above the ground. I walked closer and saw it was made from nylon rope.
Pushing my way through more brush around the crumbling foot of the bluff, I discovered there was no way up the cliff. The prehistoric structure is inaccessible until someone finds a way to extend or replace that rope ladder. But below the hanging ladder is a small alcove with a sandy floor covered with recent footprints, and at the back of the alcove I found a tin box full of notes from previous visitors, as recent as six days ago. So much for my romantic fantasy.
When I first explored cliff dwellings in Utah 35 years ago, they seemed so exotic, and their locations so beautiful, that I didn’t really question why they’d been built or what life might’ve been like for their residents. It took decades of hard lessons for me to realize these were last-ditch hideouts for desperate people living in constant fear of attack – the prehistoric equivalent of today’s doomsday preppers. They were likely only inhabited briefly during times of known threat.
The wall above me had been incredibly hard to build, and has tiny windows that would be perfect for shooting arrows through. Unless there’s a spring inside the alcove – highly unlikely – whoever was using the shelter would have to traverse down a mile and 900 vertical feet to the nearest seasonal stream for water, and carry their supplies back up that difficult slope. To me, this appeared to be a lookout, from which scouts could scan a vast area of strategic terrain on a route between fertile river valleys in the east and west.
Now came the hard part – the descent of that difficult slope on my already hurting knee. When I reached the ledge below the bluffs, I saw another man approaching, and we exchanged waves as I moved to the side to get a better panorama.
Farther down, descending one of those stone sheets lined with loose rock, I finally stumbled and had a “soft” fall that hurt nothing but my already injured knee. Served me right – I would just end up taking more pain pills and enduring a slower recovery.
Late lunch in the tiny county seat to the north was so mediocre that despite my hunger, I couldn’t finish it. And the drive home on that previously lonely road was made stressful by an endless series of city people in Japanese sedans, tailgating me, imagining themselves race drivers on the tight, steep curves. Where did they come from, and where were they all going?
