"Watch out for loose boards," a local resident cautioned me. "Every year a few more fall into the stream."
I pondered his warning while crossing the swollen San Juan River on a rickety, two-foot-wide suspension bridge. With every step I took, the shaky span rocked from side to side, threatening to spill me into the swiftly flowing current five feet below. I hoped he meant planks fell into the river, not hikers.Reaching the opposite bank, I walked 20 minutes up the road to a cliff dwelling nestled in an alcove on the Navajo Reservation. A massive sandstone overhang protected the remains of a 14-room stone structure, abandoned long before Columbus discovered America. Alone, I shared the site with the spirit of its ancient inhabitants who decorated the cliff with hands silhouetted in circles of ochre paint and whose fingerprints indented the building's mud mortar. As I admired the edifice, a Navajo family worked cornfields in the flood plain far below, much as the Anasazi once had done.
These resplendent, unnamed ruins near Bluff were my first stop on the Trail of the Ancients, a 160-mile highway loop in southeast Utah that traverses some of the most intriguing wonders found anywhere in canyon country. The trail borrows its name from Ancient Ones, the Anasazi, who inhabited the region's arid valleys and mesas for hundreds of years before mysteriously vanishing in the 13th century.
To learn more about their bygone culture, I took U.S. 91 to the trail's northeast corner in Blanding.
The museum at Edge of the Cedars State Park, found on the town's outskirts, holds the area's largest collection of Anasazi artifacts. Outside, sculptor Joe Pachak's eerie statues depict three-dimensional rock-art figures, while inside, exhibits contrast the lives of the Ancient Ones with modern tribes. A fully restored, underground ceremonial chamber (kiva) highlights the ruins behind the museum.
Kivas were important to the Anasazi, so, not surprisingly, the nearby ruins at Butler Wash have four. To reach the site, the trail heads west from Blanding on U-95. A short path leads to a viewpoint overlooking cliff dwellings built high in a shallow cave at the end of a box canyon. A sharp ravine separates visitors from the structures, but not from their impact. "I'm more interested with this site than the mega-ruins of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon," I overhead one traveler say.
Not all Anasazi homes were erected in the shelter of overhangs like those in Butler Wash. A few miles west at Mule Canyon, the Ancient Ones built on flatlands. The site contains the remains of a two-story tower, a block of square rooms and a large roofless kiva now protected by a canopy. I probed the ruins with Bill and Alice, vacationers from Seattle, who sought alternatives to national parks. "We love it here," exclaimed Alice. "You can look to your heart's content without the crowds."
One less-crowded preserve is Natural Bridges National Monument, on the northwest corner of the Trail of the Ancients. An eight-mile, one-way road provides views of three massive, water-carved sandstone spans, each with its own personality. Middle-aged Sipapu, is sturdy, well-shaped with an almost symmetrical opening. Kachina, the youngest, is big and bulky like a brawny teenager. Owachomo, the oldest, is long and slender, gracefully displaying its senior status.
After leaving the monument, the trail turns south to follow U-261 across the gently undulating top of Cedar Mesa. Infrequent openings in the thick pinyon and juniper forest allowed me only an occasional glimpse of distant canyons.
After 23 miles, where signs advise the start of a steep descent, I took an unmarked, natural surface side road southwest to Muley Point, a precipitous peninsula jutting from the edge of the high plateau. Walls plunge abruptly to sloping skirts or rocky rubble, followed by another flat plain a thousand feet below, which in turn is transected by the sinuous gorge of the glistening San Juan River. Across a huge void, the monolithic towers of Monument Valley poke upward like tiny burrs on the distant horizon.
I sat on the edge of the abyss. Canyon wrens whistled their scale of descending notes, swallows dived by with a whoosh, and buzzing bumble bees feasted on prince's plume pollen.
While I was admiring the spectacle before me, a retired couple from California drove up. "Have you done the dugway yet?" Howard asked. "Three miles. Eleven hundred feet. All gravel," he warned. "Scary," his wife, Elaine, added.
Blasting a road down such a precipice seemed impossible, but engineers did it in a section of highway called the Moki Dugway. The blacktop stops as the roadbed angles steeply down in a series of tight switchbacks. Asked why the surface had not been paved, one local suggested it was to slow down traffic and save lives. I crept down in low gear.
My velocity resumed when pavement reappeared at the bottom, but soon another side road beckoned, this time for Goosenecks State Park. Once a lazy, meandering river, the San Juan is now deeply entrenched in a tortuous chasm of its own making. At plateau's edge, I viewed the river flowing through three giant loops, each almost doubling back on itself. The scale was so grand that what appeared to be tiny specks on the silty water were actually six-person rafts floating in the current 700 feet below.
The foreboding canyon of the San Juan begins near Mexican Hat, named for a nearby rock formation shaped like a man wearing a sombrero. This town at the trail's southwest corner is a good place to stop for food, gas or supplies.
Back up the Trail of the Ancients, I found another side road to explore, this one a traverse of the Valley of the Gods. Its western end begins near the base of Moki Dugway at Valley of the Gods Bed & Breakfast. Built from the remains of an abandoned ranch, this beautifully furnished inn is so remote it must use solar panels for power, and the only phone is cellular. I asked co-owner Gail Goeken about the valley, and he assured me it was well worth the 17-mile journey.
I drove the graded road, wandering among towering formations with appropriately suggestive names like "Balanced Rock," "Rooster and Sitting Hen Buttes" and the "Seven Sailors." This lonely land of standing stone seemed like a junior version of Monument Valley without the commercialization.
The Valley of the Gods byway ends at U.S. 163 where the trail stretches back toward its southeast corner in Bluff, site of the area's first Mormon settlement. In 1880, pioneers carved a nearly impossible route across the canyon of the Colorado River, then pushed onward to this cliff-bound valley along the San Juan. I savored the hamlet's historical roots as I walked its quiet streets, loosely following a self-guided tour past century-old homes and the overgrown remains of an original log cabin.
A few miles east of town, Saint Christopher's Church sits like a shady oasis surrounded by barren sandstone. This vintage Episcopalian mission welcomes visitors, so I took advantage and strolled through its peaceful compound. From nearby, I could look across the San Juan to the ruins that await brave souls willing to cross on the teetering suspension span.
As I left, a small car with out-of-state plates turned down the access road to the bridge. I hoped someone had cautioned them to watch out for loose boards.