Cedar Mesa, Utah ~ October 13th, 2007

Location... Cedar Mesa contains many wonderful canyons to explore and photograph. These amazing places were inhabited by those we call the Basketmaker people from 200 -  700 A.D. They built pit houses, storage cysts, and small masonry dwellings. Their subsistence involved hunting and farming corn (maize) and beans in the temperate canyon bottoms. They also left behind pottery of intricate design and artistic petroglyphs and pictographs along the canyon walls surrounding their homes and hunting grounds. Their lives, artifacts and  rather sudden disappearance from the landscape has captured the interest and imagination of today's modern man.

October brings cooler temperatures, fewer visitors and the colors of autumn are practically bursting throughout the canyons. Go early for the morning light and you'll have plenty of extra time for exploring beyond where most people stop, turn around, and return to the trailhead. And remember that there is more than just the fantastic Anasazi Ruins to photograph...

The conditions were perfect this weekend (in my humble opinion) and typical for this time of year - partly cloudy skies with temperatures in the 40's at 7:30am, then warming into the middle 50's by 9:00am.

Best known for Fire House Ruin, South Mule Canyon offers easy hiking and striking scenery. The hike to the ruin is short, easy to follow, mostly flat (other than leaving the road-bed and dropping 50 feet into the canyon), and winds back and forth, and sometimes directly in, the seasonal stream bed. The trail beyond the ruins is much fainter and requires the hiker to pay a bit more attention to route finding. But this makes it all the more intriguing for the intrepid explorer in us all...

South Mule Canyon Slideshow >

Road Canyon contains the famous Fallen Roof Ruin and many others. This hike is moderate in difficulty and can present some route finding challenges. The trail begins at a relatively unmarked trailhead and winds through the cedars to the canyon rim. There it drops into a short but steep descent to the canyon floor. The trail alternates between easy slickrock and choked vegetation and debris. When the trail begins to wind by large Cottonwood trees, start looking up, to your left for ruins on the South facing walls.

Road Canyon Slideshow >