Friday April 25th was our sixth day in Utah. We had arranged for Brent of Paria Outpost to take us back out into the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, just over the Utah border into Arizona. We wanted to spend some more time exploring the archaeological sites in this area of the Paria Plateau. We met Brent at the Outpost at 8:30AM and packed all our gear into the truck. Soon we were on the road. We headed back down the House Rock Valley Road, and soon were over the state line in Arizona. Brent turned off onto one of the many sand trails that criss-crossed the area, and headed off across country. Our first stop was at the Pinnacle Valley Well. This site was in steady use back in the day when the local ranchers used to keep cattle pastured here. I set up my big camera to take a photograph and while I was doing that the girls were kept busy trying to capture the lizards that were living around and under the old bunkhouse.
Later on we continued further out and headed towards an area called the White Knolls. Our first stop was at a fantastic pictograph site. Pictographs are rock art that is painted onto the surface of the rock. Petroglyphs are rock art that is carved or pecked into the surface of the rock. Everything that we had seem up to this point in our trip was a petroglyph. This was our first pictograph site. This place was really cool, and like a number of other locations that we had stopped at, there were pottery fragments and stone flakes from tool making, all over the place. I find this really fascinating, that the Anasazi disappeared almost 1000 years ago and that these remnants of their presence call still be experienced.
We had our lunch here at this spot before hiking up to see the pictographs up close. Later we continued on for a short distance to another butte. Brent was fairly certain that there was a pueblo ruin on top of this butte. We scrambled up to the top and wandered around for a while. Brent eventually realized that the ruin was on the next butte over, so we just headed over that way. The area was beautiful, with stone slabs, sandstone formations, pinyon and cedar trees and just all sorts of things that were so new to us. On one layered sandstone slope I found these cool little clumps of vegetation that I did not recognize.
Eventually we found our way up onto the neighboring butte and found the pueblo ruin. It was simply amazing, to think that people had lived here so long ago. Brent theorizes that this was built towards the end of their time as it is up in such a high, difficult to access location and that it may have been built here for defensive purposes. Other than the stone walls there is little left here in the way of artifacts or evidence that anyone lived here for any length of time.
By this time it was getting to be fairly late in the afternoon. We tried to find our way to another ruin that Brent was aware of, but the Bureau of Land Management has closed the road in. We drove a little further south to the rim of the Vermilion Cliffs. But, the road ended about half a mile from the rim, and the girls were getting too tired to do any more walking. So, we reluctantly turned back and made our way back to the Outpost. It took nearly two hours to drive out of the back country, return to the House Rock Valley Road, and eventually make our way back down Highway 89. When we finally arrived it was getting quite late. We said our goodbyes to Brent, and vowed that we would be back again next year.
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