August 25: Canyon Exploration

The great thing about car camping is that we get to eat out every night, on a picnic table.  But after a day of hiking, or automobile bouncing, we sometimes like to eat in.  Blanding has two choices:  the Subway or the A & W.  Last night it was Subways for dinner; root beer floats for dessert.  A lot of Navajos patronize Subways.

What they cannot do is buy beer or any other alcoholic beverage.  Blanding is dry, whether due to its Mormon population (there is only one church in town) or to the problem of reservation alcoholism.  Root beer is OK, though.

Today we drove over the local geological wonder, Comb Ridge, to hike in the Cedar Mesa area.  Comb Ridge is a massive, 100-mile long "anticline" running from the San Juan River to the Abajo Mountains.

It was pushed up millions of years ago by underground pressure, as were the Moab Ridge and the San Rafael Swell further north.  Driving over it and around it is a spectacular visual experience, in which the ancient geology of the earth is opened up with surgical precision.

Anasazi and Navajo mythologies attribute "snake-like" qualities of life and death to the Ridge.

We briefly stopped at a wayside exhibit that nicely showed what an early Anasazi unit pueblo would have looked like.

The kiva was open to allow tourists to see clearly the ventilator shaft, deflector rock, fire pit, and sipapu--as well as how a "Mesa Verde-style" kiva was constructed.

Then we drove over half a road to the south fork of Mule Canyon

and parked on what looked like a stable place.  This is not a difficult canyon to hike, and we did not get quite as far as we wished.  Shucks.  I was carrying water and supplies in our backpack, and Janet was a little under the weather.  But we did make 6 miles in 4 hours.  (Not the 2 hours our informant had told us.)

However, we were rewarded with the sight of ancient granaries high on the cliff face

and some colorful flowers along the way.

Apparently, horse flies also like colorful flowers.  Since it had stormed recently, the creek we kept having to walk through was quite wet and muddy.  So were our shoes.

High on the south-facing cliff face were Pueblo III cliff dwellings.

This one had a wall to keep residents from falling.  We climbed part way up to see it, but the last 50 feet were a bit daunting and I was content to use my telephoto settings.

The prize, however, was an ancient pueblo ruin that we could reach.  Hikers and photographers usually call it the "House on Fire" because of the flame-like pattern of the cave's ceiling.

We did not actually climb in or disturb anything, trying to be good explorers.

But being this close enabled us to admire the workmanship of these ancient people, such as the care they used to construct their windows and doorways

--techniques we still use today.

We also had a bonus.  We continued to walk around the edge of the cave and between a couple of huge boulders.

It was clear that there were once rooms hidden under the boulders and storage facilities on the other side.  But coming back through them we immediately looked up and spotted handprints over the boulder entrance.

These are not unusual pictographs at Anasazi cave sites, but none of our sources had mentioned these ancient statements of ownership.  Or are they statements of being connected to the canyon?  These were canyon people.