October 5: Ultimates

Temperatures are dropping and so are our adrenaline levels.  One night it hit 34º, while daytime temperatures could still hover in the 80s.  Welcome to the desert.  We have no tent heater, but did devise some ingenious ways to fight the night cold.  We have those "space age" emergency blankets you can carry in your pocket.  We place them between the tent and the cape and get some extra thermal benefit.  A couple of nights in Bluff City actually produced condensation on the tent.

We decided to make one last grand voyage into Grand Gulch via what is called the "Government Trail."  As you might imagine, this is not a popular trailhead in Utah, too socialistic.  It was originally built by the C.C.C. back in the 30s, but hardly maintained since.  It is a 2.5 mile hike across the mesa top to get to the top of Grand Gulch.  There was actually a side canyon (Polly's Canyon) on our right.

And there's the Bear's Ears.

We thought that the hike would be easy, until we returned back.  What we thought would be a 9-mile hike turned out to be a tedious 14-mile hike--according to my GPS, which was keeping track of our progress.

We could not afford to make a mistake this time because the days were getting much shorter.  We got to the top of Grand Gulch in the first hour (the trail there was actually a little over 3 miles).  Good.  There was one of the few signs in Grand Gulch, proudly letting us know that we were in the Grand Gulch Primitive Area.

We suspected as much.

We stopped to admire the view into the big canyon.

It's not as far down as the drop off Dead Horse Point, but then we never planned to climb down from Dead Horse Point.  I am not surprised by what a big river like the Colorado or San Juan can do in terms of carving out canyons.  The real surprise is what an intermittent stream can do.  I would compare it to the tortoise and hare parable, except there are flash floods to consider.  That would be comparable to the tortoise on occasional steroids.

Anyway, Basketmakers and their Anasazi cousins were living in these canyons for centuries.  For some reason.  Perhaps they were farming the mesa tops.  Perhaps they just liked the neighborhood.  Not too many neighbors.  Utah is still like that.

We stopped at the sign and had lunch.

I continue to be amazed that Janet seems to be enjoying the challenge and foolishly trusting my planning.

As we eat, we gazed across the canyon at a massive rincon, called Polly's Island, and spotted a pristine looking Anasazi (late Pueblo III) ruin directly opposite.

Pristine?  Heliocopter pothunters have probably looted it long ago.  We speculated on how anyone would enter it (a rincon is totally isolated on four sides by the canyon), and decided we had more urgent business to think about.

Our goal was a well know Basketmaker II pictograph called the "Big Man Panel."  It was a mile and a half upstream.  Easy, right?

We would have been in trouble had we not been passed by a young couple on the way down the south side of the canyon.  As we were picking our way over boulders and crossing ledges, we stopped to let them pass.  A few jokes later, and we were explaining our destination to them.  They had been there last year; could not find it until a guide with another party showed them how to reach it.  Its way up high and requires finding some route up steep slickrock, if you can find a trail in the first place and know where to look.  At the time, I thought technology was on my side--I had GPS coordinates for the Big Man Panel, thanks to an illicit internet source that I will not reveal.

As soon as we got down to the bottom of the gulch, we lost the trail.  Fortunately, our two friends were also looking for a way through the thickets and found a possible path.  It led to a small campsite that we knew was at the right location.  We remembered the site, just in case we got caught in darkness.  I had my ultraviolet light water purification system with us, as well as chlorine dioxide drops and a mechanical filter, if needed.

This is the time to say something about hiking in Grand Gulch.  It is a little disappointing, given its importance.  Yes, there are ruins and rock art almost every quarter mile or less.  But you cannot see them.  The tamarisk grows about 8-10 tall everywhere

 and obscures a view of anything other than the tops of the canyon walls.  This is not the canyon's fault.  Some idiot brought tamarisk into the American West a century ago and now this foreigner is taking over the river beds.

Even worse, tamarisk is a woody, dense shrub that prevents any attempt at bushwhacking through it.  Hikers have to find a way around it.  The BLM has no intention of cutting it down.  It seriously detracts from the adventure.

We fought our way up canyon, looking for clues as to where a trail might be.

We spotted a rock art panel that was not mentioned in any of my sources.

Cool.  Seemed to us to be obviously Basketmaker II in origins.

Maleness was proudly on display.

(By the way, a ranger at Mesa Verde told us that in the 1920s the National Park Service destroyed petroglyphs after matrons at the time protested their obscene character.  "That was not a wise thing to do," he understated.)

Happily, the GPS guided us to a granary that was near the pictograph we sought.

Soon we came to a huge rock face that we knew had to be the site.

The panel was at the base of the large alcove, several ledges up.

It took us quite a while to figure out a path up,

and we would not have done that if it had not been for the couple we met coming down.  I am not sure that Janet was thrilled at having to climb up a steep rock face about 100 feet up, after hiking all that way.

But she did, and she made it down OK too.

The panel itself was small, even intimate.

Why was it called the Big Man Panel

when the female was just as large as the male?

She was more elaborately costumed than he

and she looked a bit more contented.

By contrast, the male looked a bit sad.

Perhaps he wished he really were a Big Man.

(By the way, this is not little boy humor;  male genitalia are one of the characteristic features of Basketmaker rock art--perhaps having some religious significance in that culture.  Pueblo origin stories stress the sacredness of procreative impulses, as well as the social importance of learning how to control them properly.  We, who take cultural survival for granted, snicker.)  And, of course, there were the usual handprints.

Signatures perhaps.

On the way back, we were momentarily confused about where the government trail leading out of the canyon was located.  From high on the ledge overlooking us,

our young couple  called down to us and guided us to the upward path.

Despite being exhausted, we chatted with them back at the trailhead.  They come down from Salt Lake City every year to vacation on Cedar Mesa, just like the elderly couple we met at the Natural Bridges campground.  They too were looking for rock art panels in Grand Gulch.  We exchanged observations about how unprepared some folk are who venture into these canyons.  Just days before, hikers had to be rescued after spending the night alone in the canyons of Natural Bridges.

It was already getting dark when we said goodbye to our friends.  They had been surprised to meet seniors from Pennsylvania who wanted to undertake such a venture.  We were surprised to have met such friends along they way.  They were the only people we had met since the two lost hikers days before in Collins Canyon.  We would not have been successful if they had not arrived when we did and passed us going down.

We drove back in the dark.  But now I had complete confidence in the Jeep to take us over the road away.  It was too dark to shower this time.  I kept thinking about what that biker said to us in Bluff City.  It was time to return to Pennsylvania.