When driving in Utah, one has to be on the lookout for cows. They can be anywhere. Fences are used to separate herds from each other and to confine herds to particular areas, but the roads, be they dirt tracks or paved state highways, are considered part of the grazing land. So when we went looking for Road Canyon to hike to an Indian ruin, we had to be careful of all the cows and calves along the way. And we had to open a fence gate of pine branches and barbed wire that was meant to control the cattle’s grazing area.

Then another mile down the road we found the trailhead in a pinon pine forest area.

The reward at the end of our hike was a very nice ruin of four rooms plus a storage cist. It was perched high on a ledge in the canyon wall. Hand prints were clearly visible in the mortar that the Indians pressed between the adobe bricks and the windows had a piece of wood spanning the top. No one knows for sure, but the consensus estimate of the age of this ruin is about 900 years.

The next day we hiked a couple of miles in Mule Canyon and found the House on Fire ruin that has been photographed many times by many photographers. The natural lighting combine with the color and texture of the rocks to simulate a conflagration. It was a nice hike and fairly easy climb up the canyon wall to the ledge where the Indians had built their dwellings.

We spent 5 days at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Bureau of Land Management’s first national monument which was founded in 1996. It encompasses 1.9 million acres of high, remote plateaus, cliffs and gulches more or less in the middle of southern Utah. This territory was the last place in the continental USA to be mapped and is still pretty wild, undeveloped and almost totally lacking in resources. We hiked to a spectacular waterfall, an arch to make Arches National Park jealous, and 3 slot canyons that are on one recently published “top ten” list.

The slots were great. They are very narrow across the top, often three feet or less, and quite deep with walls of 30 to 60 feet being common. Indirect lighting from above on the richly colored sandstone walls produces beautiful colors. Years of episodic flash-flooding with walls of water, rocks, mud and tree limbs, have sculpted fantastic shapes in the canyon walls. We started with Dry Fork Gulch.

And then we moved on to Peek-A-Boo Gulch, my first experience with a hanging canyon. The oval entrance was 12 feet higher than the sandy wash below and it was a bit of a struggle to get to the entrance with only a few widely-spaced, well-worn foot holds. But Jigs and Jafcy made it to the entrance while the ladies waited below.

The third slot we explored was Spooky Gulch. After a conventional ground-level entrance, Spooky quickly narrowed to the point that we had to remove our hydration packs just to wriggle past another narrow spot. In fact, I had to abandon the exploration while Paul and Sue continued a slender brother-sister quest further up the very constricted canyon.

Exploring the slots was wonderful fun that completely justified the somewhat arduous trek down and later, back up, several hundred vertical feet of slickrock.

Stay tuned for Lower Calf Creek Falls and Broken Bow arch hike reports.