[cdt-l] If it's Tuesday, this must be....

[Jim and/or Ginny Owen]

So where are Jim & Ginny now ?

Still alive – and back in Utah, after a brief detour to Nevada to check out 
Great Basin National Park.  That was a pleasant surprise – a beautiful snow 
covered 13,000’ peak, several nice and mostly empty hiking trails, some 
petroglyphs and pictographs, a beautiful cave with a lot of interesting cave 
decorations, including a couple of new-to-us kinds:  ‘shields’ and ‘cave 
turnips’.  Snow still covers most of the high-country trails, which affected 
our hiking, but it was beautiful.  We set up in one of the campgrounds for 
several days and considered staying for a few more days – but the holiday 
weekend meant more crowds, so it was time to leave. Another time we’d like 
to climb nearby Mt. Moriah, but with snow still an issue at 10,000’, we 
decided to wait until a later day.

Before that we did a couple of short backpacking trips in the Escalante – 
first in busy Coyote Gulch, where we managed to find a couple of ruins and 
pictographs that we hadn’t expected to see, then an overnight trip down 
Willis slot canyon to Sheep Creek to the Paria River to Deer Creek – and 
back - where we again found ancient rock art in a couple of places.  It is 
fun combining our interest in ancient rock art with backpacking.  Both hikes 
were wet hikes where you follow a creek, crossing back and forth numerous 
times.  The water was warm and quite shallow – only ankle deep at most.  
Both were beautiful hikes through narrow red walled canyons.  Coyote Gulch 
was very popular with backpackers – there were at last 10 other ‘group’s out 
there when we did our hike, and the Paria was also busier than expected, 
especially on a Sunday.  No backpackers, but horses, jeeps and ATV’s.  Our 
plan to hike Round Canyon to Hackberry to Cottonwood will have to wait until 
another day.  A combination of threatening thunderstorms and a problem 
getting into Round Canyon’s deep and narrow slot caused us to detour to 
Kodachrome State Park instead where we enjoyed the unusual rock formations.

On the way to Great Basin NP, we finally got to visit Cedar Breaks National 
Monument.  We were there two years ago at exactly the same time of year and 
it was buried in 4 feet of snow.  This time it was just COLD.  But it’s a 
beautiful place – a Bryce Canyon NP in miniature.

We also went back to the Parowan Gap petroglyph site – another place we 
visited two years ago.  Seems like it’s deteriorated somewhat.  There don’t 
seem to be as many petroglyphs as before.  But we’ll compare what we found 
this time to the pictures we took two years ago.  Maybe it’s our 
imagination?

Today we hiked through one of the Bristlecone Pine groves in Great Basin NP 
– if you’re gonna hug a tree why not make it a 3200 year-old tree?  Then we 
drove east via Rte 50 which is claimed to be the “loneliest road in 
America.”  I believe it.

This afternoon we visited Fremont Indian State Park – which has a decent 
museum and hundreds of pictograph, petroglyph and pictoglyph panels on the 
cliffs around the Park.  The museum has a fine example of a Clovis point 
(arrowhead) from about 13,500 BC.  When UDOT  built I-70 they discovered the 
largest Fremont Indian village ever found.  They destroyed it (after the 
archaeologists excavated it) – and then built a state park to show the many 
rock art panels that were nearby that weren’t destroyed by the freeway.  It 
was a busy place, 800 years or so ago.  When they destroyed the village, 
they also destroyed another nearby sacred site - which pissed off a Hopi 
medicine man, who cursed them (UDOT).  The results of the curse were 
spectacular.  So much so that when they built the State Park, they carefully 
put the Visitor Center in a place that wasn’t included in the curse.  Crazy? 
  Maybe. But UDOT doesn’t think so.

Our plans for the next week or so include playing treasure hunt at some more 
Fremont sites in eastern Utah– in particular the 50-mile long Nine Mile 
Canyon.  There are a lot of them in that area that are worth a visit – or so 
we hear.  After that – who knows?  We are still playing it one day at a 
time.  A little hiking, a little touring – there’s a lot to see and do.

Walk softly,
Ginny & Jim


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