Cedar Mesa Memorial Weekend // ADVENTR.co

Friday – Sunday, May 24-26, 2019

Years ago I used to spend my Memorial Day weekends exploring the canyons of Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah, which was before I started going to The Maze, but then I stopped doing that when it seemed like the cedar gnats (no-see-ums) were starting to get worse during that time of the year. This year my friend Alan was going to be in the area over the holiday weekend and asked if I’d be able to join him for a couple of hikes, so I thought it would be nice to return to that old annual tradition and said yes! Our original plan was to explore some of the canyons up from Elk Ridge, but thanks to a late season snowstorm we decided to skip the muddy roads and changed our plans to stay lower in the canyons of Cedar Mesa instead.

Ruins & Pictographs

I left after work on Friday and drove down to Cedar Mesa where I met up with Alan so we could spend the rest of the weekend hiking together. Just like I remembered, the cedar gnats were coming out in the evenings on top of the mesa and were pretty annoying, but when we were hiking in the canyons we didn’t notice them. Maybe because it was a little bit windy out this weekend? Thanks to the recent storms (it’s been a very wet spring) there was water everywhere in the canyons with creeks flowing and abundant potholes full of water. Throughout the weekend we went on a couple long hikes and a couple short ones, we both revisited a couple of sites and found plenty of new ones, too! It was a very nice weekend for hiking in the canyons. Since Alan had to leave on Sunday afternoon to meet up with another friend elsewhere and the weather forecast for Memorial Day was looking like a lot of rain, I decided to head home early on Sunday evening so I could spend the holiday resting at home with Diane. Enjoy the photos that I took this weekend!

Round Room