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Below the Bears Ears: Thanksgiving Weekend 2024

Cedar Mesa Chronicles: Chapter 13 | Thursday – Sunday, November 28 – December 1, 2024

This year for the extended Thanksgiving holiday weekend Diane and I returned to the landscape surrounding the Bears Ears and spent all four days wandering a selection of canyons and rims carved into Cedar Mesa and beyond. Our time was split between searching for new sites and revisiting sites that I hadn’t been back to in over a decade but were mostly new to Diane. We saw quite a bit more rock art this time around with only a few ruins scattered throughout our hikes. In the end we had another great weekend exploring one of our favorite places together and look forward to returning again and again. These are some photos of what we saw.

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Borderlands of the Bears Ears Country II

Friday – Sunday, November 22-24, 2024

This weekend I met up with a friend so we could explore some new places surrounding Bears Ears National Monument, although we did end up making our way up onto the edges of Cedar Mesa for a couple of short hikes, too. I left from work on Friday afternoon, grabbed dinner at Milt’s in Moab before they close for the winter, and then continued on towards Blanding where I stopped for an evening photo over Recapture Reservoir before finding a campsite just outside of town and getting to bed early. Then early on Saturday morning I met up with my friend in Blanding and we headed out into the Borderlands of the Bears Ears Country for the rest of the weekend. These are some photos of what we saw.

Cedar Mesa Chronicles: Chapter 12

Friday – Sunday, May 10-12 & 17-19, 2024

After leaving the UGIC Conference on Friday afternoon I was originally planning to spend the rest of the weekend exploring the nearby Book Cliffs and Tavaputs Plateau, but with all the rain and snow the area had received this week, and with even more predicted over the next couple of days, I figured that was probably not a great place to be right now. Although I did have backup plans for the San Rafael Swell in case of bad weather, after saying goodbye to Moab on Thursday I was feeling the need to get out into a landscape that I have a more personal connection with and feel at home in so I could grieve alone, so I decided to head down to Cedar Mesa, even if it meant a longer drive out of the way. Since I was leaving from Price, this meant I could avoid the traffic in Moab and drive to Cedar Mesa through Hanksville, which is a route I don’t drive very often since it usually doesn’t make much sense for me to go that way. After stopping for an early dinner in Hanksville, I followed North Wash and White Canyon to Cedar Mesa and went straight to the Todie Canyon Trailhead so I could walk the rim at sunset.

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Borderlands of the Bears Ears Country

Saturday & Sunday, April 27-28, 2024

This weekend Diane and I headed down to the edges of Bears Ears National Monument so we could hike and search for rock art and ruins in some of the canyons along the borderlands of the monument. We were originally planning to leave after work on Friday, but rain was predicted for the area overnight and into the early morning, so instead we decided to leave early on Saturday morning and timed it so we would arrive after the weather was supposed to be over leaving cooler temperatures and partly cloudy skies behind. Our timing worked out perfectly! Although we would see a lot of interesting and unusual rock art this weekend, much of it was hard to see and photograph, so I’ll just share some of the better photos below.

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The Grandest of Gulches: Back Into Lower Grand Gulch

Cedar Mesa Chronicles: Chapter 11 | Thursday – Sunday, March 21-24, 2024

This week Diane and I took Thursday and Friday off from work so we could meet up with our friend Jared and spend a couple of days backpacking into lower Grand Gulch within the Bears Ears National Monument. While this would be Diane’s first time hiking into this part of Grand Gulch, Jared and I had hiked here about nine years ago and I was really looking forward to the return visit. From the very start of the hike we could tell there was a lot of water in the canyon from recent storms and that it might have even flash flooded recently, but all that water also created a lot of quicksand and mud in the wash that significantly slowed down our progress and forced us to follow brushy deer trails across the benches in many places. The weather during the first three days of our hike was great and the nights even stayed pretty warm, we only encountered wet weather during our final night in the canyon and during the hike back out of Collins Canyon. Here are some photos taken during our four days in Grand Gulch.