Tuesday

Yesterday the wind picked up, a front was moving through, at least the edge of it and the sand was everywhere. The center was some place up in Salt Lake. Last time this happened to me down here, I got so much sand in the camera that it had to be taken in and cleaned. That was a $160 dollar mistake; fine particles of sand in the air don’t mix too well with high-end digital cameras. As a result most of the time it stayed in my backpack.

I seem to be having a problem putting pictures with the text on my blog site; the mac doesn’t give me the option of reducing the size of the JEPG image. I tried to put several images on, but they just clog the upload with such a large file. I’ll most likely have to add them in when I get back to Salt Lake City. We leave tomorrow for the Grand Gulch, so I’ll be out of contact for several days. Wi-Fi hasn’t come to the remote canyons of southern Utah yet.

We did Monarch Canyon yesterday, its one of the classics along the Butler was road. A beautiful ruin sitting on top of an overhang with a pool of water below, some large cottonwood trees are growing by the side of the pool. I’ve painted the spot several times.

It was a short hike; most were tired from the day before, so after a few hours we were back at the hotel.

After lunch Dave knocked at the door and wanted to know if I was interested in finding the moki steps from the Anasazi that crossed over comb ridge. We have seen them from the Butler wash side but never from the cliff side of comb wash. We took the long dusty dirt road up the comb valley, after seven miles or so we saw a large outcrop of rocks with some Pictographs marking the way. We were close, we scoured the cliff face and went back to a low point, and there we headed up the steep incline of dirt and boulders, to base of the cliff. It was a low saddle in the other wise 800-foot cliff face. This area was maybe 50 feet to get over the edge and up there we saw the carved footsteps made by the Anasazi eight hundred years ago. There were well worn from time, but still could be used today. The only problem being that they were rather exposed; if you were to peal off of them the fall would be enough to break something. We decided it wasn’t worth it, since we have been up from the other direction any ways. By this time the skies were orange from the sand and wind. Our eyes were feeling the grit in the air.

That evening it was red wine and lasagna.

Richard Boyer