A nice quiet trip to Utah. We camp in primitive areas so it’s just Jim, the dogs and me (Julie). No other people around. The weather was good most days; we had a couple days where it was too windy to camp and took refuge in a hotel.
Took a new route through Dove Creek, CO (famous for Anasazi beans) over to Moab. We found sun and blue skies by the time we got to Hite, Utah. It was windy through so slept in the back of the car instead of setting up our tent. It’s a little tight with the dogs but it works—better than having the tent blow away or collapse in on us. We hiked canyons from our camp site. Found some areas that must have been stops for ancient people. Found lots of chips of chert, evidence of fires, and bones. I stumbled across a really nice point too—the white one.
Chips and point found near Hite
We left our Hite campsite on Tuesday and headed south hoping to find sun but ran into rain, snow, and wind. So much wind that the sky turned red with dust and rained red mud on us (red sky pic at right).
We camped out in hotels for a couple days. The hotel in Bluff, Utah was complete with a black house cricket of the giant Utah variety (as big as my thumb), a couple widow spiders, and a few mini roach looking bugs (Julie evicted them). Traveling with dogs in rural areas doesn’t really allow you to be choosy when it comes to hotels.
When the wind died down, we headed back toward Hite but decided to see if we could find a different place to camp. Found an unmarked road off of the highway on Cedar Mesa near Grand Gulch and followed it to an area where it dead ended. Found a tree where we could sort of protect our tent and actually get stakes into the ground (the area we camped in is mostly sandstone). Our tent blends in pretty well; it’s behind the tree.
We hiked around a bit near camp and Jim thought he saw something that looked like a crumbling wall. Sure enough there were ruins from something just around the corner from our camp site. The rock that Jim’s standing in front of at left bottom had walls at some point. We also found a bunch of chert chips and some pieces of tools nearby.
Spent the next couple days hiking the canyons near our Cedar Mesa camp site. Found a bunch of pottery shards near a spring—all sorts of styles and colors. This is the first red one we’ve found. Jim found some sort of scraping tool sitting on top of a rock while we were walking along; someone must have moved it there...or he likes to think that someone left it there 500 years ago. There was enough discoloration on the rock underneath the tool though that it had been there for a while.
All in all it was a good trip. It’s much more fun to discover ruins, tools, shards, and chips, on our own then to be running around with a guidebook. We stumble across them while out hiking.
It’s REALLY nice to get away from computers and cell phones. Jim’s laptop came along but we only used it to check the weather when we had a connection…and we loved seeing that Mother Nature was dumping inches upon inches of the white stuff on Leadville while we were enjoying sun and 60’s in Utah!
