by Steve
October 2020: the Coronavirus pandemic was raging in the US, although the spread wasn't as bad as it would get later in the fall. We had just spent the summer in the Tucson area, where they recorded the hottest summer on record in more than 100 years of record keeping. We needed to get out of the desert for a while. So we headed to southeastern Utah, where it's easy to isolate and there are interesting things like pueblo ruins and cliff dwellings to discover.
We invited our friend Larry to come along. Larry lives in Prescott, AZ, and like us had spent the summer doing a whole lot of nothing, wanting to avoid exposure to Covid-19. Larry is a fun guy, pretty adventurous, and (we thought) probably a good hiker. But most important was that Larry's truck has 4-wheel drive. So Larry came up to Blanding, UT, for 5 days or so, and we planned out some places to see.
The area around Blanding is riddled with ancient ruins. The areas of Bears Ears National Monument, Cedar Mesa, and Grand Gulch contain hundreds of these sites. Some are fairly accessible, but many of the sites require multi-day backpacking trips or longs treks down roads requiring vehicles with high clearance. Our Honda HRV couldn't get us to one of the more impressive cliff dwellings, Moon House, because the access road is 8 miles of high-clearance-vehicle road followed by 1.2 miles of 4-wheel-drive road. But since Larry has 4WD, this one was on the table.
