Grand Gulch

Where are the ruins? Can you find them? (This is kind of unfair, because my phone takes just... phone pictures...) But there are some there, I promise! After a while, you get really good at spotting the straight lines that mean 'a person did that'. This canyon was inhabited between 750 and 1250 AD, so the ruins are more or less 1,000 years old.

Grand Gulch

Thank goodness we don't have to climb out that way!

Grand Gulch

Night one campsite. You can see several meanders of the canyon in this picture. We are traveling down-canyon, to the left, then we will make a turn to the right, to cross behind the closest cliffs, then back to the left again in front of the rearmost cliffs in this picture. The whole canyon meanders like this. And on nearly every south-facing cliff full of Wingate sandstone, you find ruins.

Grand Gulch

Wingate sandstone shears off in slabs, leaving nearly vertical cliffs. Fortunately, we were not required to climb them, either up or down. The vertical drop from top to bottom of the canyon was 1,000 feet. If you've never done this, you'll be surprised to hear that going down is much harder than going up. It's so much harder to keep your weight over your feet on the way down...

Grand Gulch

John is ready for some serious backpacking! We never weighed his pack, but it sure seemed heavier than a feed sack (50 pounds). Either it would have been much less heavy than that (depressing in one way) or much more (depressing in another). I was clever, and opted to carry the food. By day four, my pack weighed less than half what it did on day one.

Fruita

When the Mormon pioneers arrived in Capitol Reef, they found irrigation ditches dug by the natives along this creek. So they made good use of them, establishing a homestead in this mostly ridiculously forbidding region.

Capitol Reef

If we just walk over this way, I'm sure we'll get to those distant, snow-capped peaks sooner or later!