Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Last week was a narrative photo post about our backpack trip through Grand Gulch in the Bears Ears National Monument. Today I'm sharing a bunch of the cool archaeology we saw there, with little comment and no order :)  Partly this is because I'm lazy, and partly because I don't have the knowledge to say much. The ruins and rock are are lumped together as "Ancestral Puebloan," but range in age from maybe 500 to 1800 years old. A stop at the museum in Blanding after the hike gave us some idea of the ages of some of the potsherds we saw, but I will need many repetitions to really get it sorted. Some ruins are pretty much inaccessible to ordinary mortals. I imagine rockfall has closed routes the original inhabitants used, but they were also definitely intrepid climbers. Other ruins were easily reached (if I got to them, they were easy). On this mud wall you can still see the handprints of the person who made it. I sat with that a while, thinking about the person who ...

I'll not deny I have some qualms about publicizing this amazing and somewhat over-visited area. I won't be including any precise location information for ruins or pictographs, though that info is out there. This hike was the purpose behind the road trip featured last weekend. After picking up Gretchen at SLC and doing our hike at Little Wild Horse Canyon, we met the other 3 members of the party in the Valley of the Gods, in Bears Ears National Monument. Today we'll focus on the hiking trip, and next week I'll provide a smorgasbord of ruins and rock art. Pre-hike dispersed camping. Not an actual campfire, but a safe gas fire for us to sit around.   Because we had to pick up our parking permits and get water info at the ranger station, then leave most of the cars and pile into one for the drive to our start point, we hit the trail at a blazing 10 a.m.  Fortunately, the weather was still relatively cool following a very cold front (didn't hurt that the TH was about 520...