A hike in Utah ends with memorable find

Spotting the crack in the cliff from the dry floor of the canyon, it looked to require an ascent of about 300 feet on loose scree, some bushwhacking, and then a short climb.

What I was looking for, I didn’t know, but probably would once I found it. These kinds of hiding places abound in the west. In the interest of not having a lot of people flock to the location, I will only say that I was within Canyonlands National Park.

Over the years I’ve done about 10 hikes in Canyonlands, always from four to 10 days. This is not extremely long, but long enough to get into some seldom-seen country. I’ve usually done these during the late winter, when it can be nice to get away from a still freezing Wyoming.

Though I was all alone, in centuries past people lived in these canyons. If you look really closely along the base of cliff walls, say as much as 20 feet above the canyon floors, you might see the remnants of stone walls, which have washed away during floods. Corn could be grown here during wetter times, particularly prior to 1300 AD, which was the beginning of a sixty-year drought; the region has still not recovered. Farming is suggested by the few remaining little corn cobs. These are sometimes found in well preserved granaries, built under rock overhangs. Here they were built with stones mortared together with mud and straw. The ones that I have seen are about one to four feet tall. Sometimes you come across petroglyphs and pictographs. Some of these were made thousands of years before cameras, and might outlast them by the same, if we accord them the protection they need. But I was to find something else.

As I ascended, some cobbles tumbled down the slope, sending echoes bouncing around the canyon. The desert brush was tough and ripped at me. Elastic oak limbs threatened to launch me right back down the scree. The cliff was nearly vertical, but eventually it rounded out and I crawled into the crack. Once inside it widened more than I could have imagined from below.

In “geospeak”, I was in a joint. These are somewhat symmetrical series of cracks, which can occur in layered sandstone. Picture a Rubik’s cube ninety feet high by as wide and deep, with each of the individual blocks thirty feet cubed. Then, carve or pry open a space between the component blocks, anywhere from an inch to several feet. Also, jellify the sandstone so that it can warp pleasingly, grow or contract, and get really weird. Now, multiply this by hundreds of times. At Canyonlands the vertical is about five blocks high, the depth a bit more, and miles long in length. Long ago, I named one of my favorite areas of jointing after the heroic character of the novel I was reading -Bilbo Baggins’ Underworld!

Now light filtered down the narrow and curving joint from above. I often had to clamber or shimmy along and under or over slabs of sandstone, trying not to break a leg, which seemed important. I looked up into a dark recess and saw what looked like a WWII-era army helmet, and about that size and color, too. It was an upside-down bowl. It rested on a level shelf of rock about 15 feet above.

Climbing on the crumbly rock I couldn’t quite reach it. I eventually got to within 4 feet of it, but never actually touched it.

To shorten this story, the bowl is now in the care of the National Park Service, in Moab, Utah. The inside is decorated with a black geometric pattern on a yellow background.

Experts say it dates from before the great drought, so it could be over 700 years old. Its style is a cross between “Chaco Canyon” and “Mogollon Rim”. Exciting as this was, I didn’t report it for four years.

I knew that neither I nor anyone else could keep it, because of the 1906 Antiquities Act, and subsequent acts of Congress to protect such artifacts. Today these laws are under attack by some politicians. These laws and artifacts and this region are now much in the news, and by and by I’ll comment on them.

The reason for the four-year delay, however, was because of another discovery, nearby and two days later, which was deeply disturbing: that of the finding of a dead man. I’ll talk about this in my next column.