Our Nest on Wheels

 In November 2021, we wrote "Where Did the Water Go" after our October visit to Lake Powell on the Arizona/Utah border. At the time we were shocked by how far the water level had fallen in the 3 years since our previous visit. In November, it looked certain that the lake level would drop below 3525 feet (above sea level). 3525 feet is considered a critical level, as the ability to generate power decreases dramatically below that level. 

Well, on March 15 of this year, Lake Powell did drop below 3525 ft, forcing the Bureau of Reclamation, who runs the dam, to act. They decided to buy a little time by increasing releases from some upstream dams, like Flaming Gorge, while reducing releases from Lake Powell. This plan has achieved a bit of the intended result, and Lake Powell levels have risen again.

 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.

 by Steve

Two years ago, we stayed for a short time (4 nights) in Blanding, Utah. This small town in southeastern Utah is not on most people's radar for tourist spots. For us, it was a convenient location for seeing Natural Bridges National Monument and the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. We didn't know what else might be in the area. What we learned was that this area is just chock-full of rock art, cliff dwellings, and ruins, most of which are not advertised or on any maps of the area. But the folks who run the RV park we stayed at told us of a couple locations where we could see cliff dwellings, and we followed their directions and were amazed at the things we could discover. Here's an example of a dwelling we found in a side canyon off an unmarked trail.  We wrote about this back in 2018.

So this year, when we were looking for places to travel where we could avoid crowds and COVID, this area came to mind. This is the site of the Bears Ears National Monument. But with the monument's greatly reduced size, most of the ruins and cliff dwellings that we visited were no longer within the monument's boundaries; rather they are just on BLM land, where they do not have the same protections. These fragile ruins are mostly protected by ignorance -- people don't know they are there, and many are difficult to get to. On our last day here, we hiked to Tower Ruin, which is pretty typical for many of the sites in this area.

Tower Ruin is located just a few miles outside of Blanding. There are no signs to it, nor does it appear on any maps of the area. The trail to it does not appear on any trail maps, nor is it really a trail (there's no trailhead signage, for example), but rather a route. The only way to find this is to follow the directions that previous hikers have left on select websites, in this case gjhikes.com. In our first attempt to locate the trailhead, we missed the spot and continued a few tenths of a mile down the dirt forest service road we were on.  We ended up spending about 50 minutes scouring the cliffside for a way down into the canyon before determining that we were not in the right spot. When we did find the right spot, we were able to find the route and begin our descent into the canyon, following cairns left by earlier travelers. Here's our first view of Tower Ruin.

The tower is a two-storey structure, with the beams that formed the floor of the second storey still intact. It's remarkably well-preserved. While it sites on a ledge in an alcove, part of the base appears to be a man-made foundation of mud and rocks. That too has lasted for hundreds of years. Needless to say, we tread carefully here, and do not touch the walls or any other fragile structures.

This pic gives you a sense of scale. I think that the people who built this were likely fairly short, at least compared with modern Americans.

The dwelling sits in a broad alcove, with enough overhead protection for the tower, a granary, and a few other mostly-gone structures, including a kiva.

As with many of the hikes in this area, we saw no one at the trailhead, no one on the trail or at the ruin, and it's remote enough that we heard nothing except the sound of an occasional bird. It's best not to hike these places alone, as there's no telling how long it might be before the next hiker comes along. 

In our next installment, we'll describe our hike to the Moon House ruin, which is considerably more difficult to reach.

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