More Travels 4-Just a Bit Rattled

Just a Bit Rattled

Heavy black clouds buried the peaks of the La Sal Mountains this morning as we left Moab for the Needles section of Canyonlands.
"They could get rain," said Andy, and just as he said it, a flash of lightning streaked to the ground. Somewhere in Colorado is getting pounded this morning.
We passed a junk yard with flattened cars piled onto flatbed trailers., "It's good to see that kind of recycling," I said.
Andy agreed. "Years ago you'd see junk cars everywhere out here. People would just leave them where they died. That's a big improvement. But only because China buys them," he added.

Pueblo Indians store grain in stone
granaries to protect food from wild
animals and enemies.

"And uses coal to melt them down," I said.Our first stop in the Needles section of Canyonlands, 71 miles from Moab, was Roadside Ruin. Only .3 mile from the road, hidden in the crevice of a sandstone ledge, we found an Anasazi granary from about 950 A.D. Ancient pueblo peoples cultivated corn, squash and beans on the arable land. The opening to this granary was in the roof.Our next stop, Cave Spring, was a .6-mile loop trail. "Short moderate trail with two ladders," I read on the sign.
Andy already knows I shy away from the taller ladders.  It's that nagging fear of unprotected edges.

The cowboy camp looks much as it must have looked in
1975 when it was last used.

We set off along the sandy trail. Not far ahead in the alcove of a sandstone butte was a cowboy camp. In the late 1800's pioneering cattlemen settled in Canyon Country. The best known was John Albert Scorup. With his partners he formed the Scorup-Sommerville Cattle Company in 1926, which eventually grew to be the largest in Utah. Their herd varied from 7,000 to 10,000 head and ranged over 1,800,000 acres.
Cowboys stayed out on the open range and used Cave Spring as an isolated camp from 1800 to 1975. The camp provided a reliable water source from seeps in the rock. Rainwater percolates down through layers of porous sandstone and flows out when it reaches an opening in the cliff face. The old camp had tin dishes and coffee pot, storage trunks, wooden tables and benches and plenty of evidence of camp fires. What a tough life it must have been eating beans, bacon, potatoes and sourdough biscuits all the time.
We resumed our walk, with a few rumbles of thunder in the distance.

Needles sandstone formations of Canyonlands
point spires skyward as storms roll in. 

"Oh goody, a ladder," I said sarcastically. It wasn't a big one, maybe ten rungs up the sheer rock face to a sandstone cliff opening. Andy climbed first. As he stepped off the top rung and I reached for the hand rail at the bottom, a two-foot long rattlesnake dropped near my feet, not 12 inches from my right sneaker. "Snake! snake! snake!" I yelled, as it rattled and looped the other direction.By this time Andy heard the rattle. "Get on the ladder," he yelled back.
Heart pounding, I was already on the fourth rung.
I wonder how many ancestral puebloan Indians died of rattlesnake bites. They used these canyons to grow corn, beans and squash seasonally between 700 and a thousand years ago.

Elephant Canyon offers back country travel
on dirt roads barely passable by jeeps.

We drove on a dirt road to Elephant Hill picnic area. Lots of hikers parked in the primitive jeep-road area, but it certainly wasn't made for a Ford Focus. 

Numerous depressions in the rough sandstone surface at
Pot Hole Point offer micro-environments for small animals.

Pot Hole Point is a .6-mile trail over a potted sandstone outcropping. Hundreds of small pot hole depressions lined with dessert varnish promised life to tiny critters whenever it rained. A few larger pot holes still held water, each one a complete ecosystem. The eggs of tiny animals lie dormant and can tolerate dryness and ground surface temperatures that may exceed 170 degrees F.  After it rains, eggs hatch and crustaceans, tadpoles, worms and insects coexist in a world bounded by the water's edge. A couple of hikers before us had said they couldn't find anything in the small pot holes of water. We watched three or four tiny critters swim in one of the few remaining water-filled holes. Hopefully, a picture will allow us to enlarge and identify the tiny creatures as tadpoles or tadpole shrimp.
At 12:08 p.m. we parked to take the 2.4-mile Slickrock Foot with four side trail viewpoints.

Slickrock Foot Trail winds between
sandstone formations in a loop of about
three miles to four major viewpoints.

"The rain is all south of us," said Andy, as we set out along a path that skirted small buttes and clambered over rock outcroppings and pothole formations. Each viewpoint gave a different perspective of the canyon below. Weather moved and rumbled around us on both sides, but overhead the sky was bright blue with intermittent puffy clouds. "We could always get under a rock ledge if it really started to rain," said Andy, as we looked out from Viewpoint #1.I was still thinking about the rattlesnake.

At Viewpoint #2, some of the rock formations offer
protection from the elements for pueblo families.

Viewpoint #2 wound in among ledges on the cliff sides. "If I were a puebloan woman, I'd let you build our house here," I told Andy. "It would be a triplex." Three large overhangs of sandstone faced each other in a cove.  Not far away tiny animals darted around in one of the larger pot holes.Just as we reached Viewpoint #4, the dark clouds joined overhead. We headed back, following the rock cairns at a slightly faster pace. The wind whipped up 40 m.p.h. gusts with blowing sand from the trail, and the temperature dropped suddenly.

Out in the open at Viewpoint #4, we have beautiful views of the
canyon but no protection from the rapidly approaching storm.

"Maybe we want to look for an overhand," said Andy, but the return trail was more exposed to the elements. Ducking behind a Utah juniper in a small depression, we wrapped the camera in a plastic bag, stowed it in the backpack and struggled to put on old plastic rain ponchos. Huge drops pelted down for about two minutes. I thought momentarily it could even have been hail, but Andy said no. And then it was over. Our hike was a fast retreat the rest of the way back to the car and a challenge to keep the plastic ponchos from blowing wildly in the strong wind. But we were no worse off for the dampness.

Newspaper Rock tells the stories of ancient times.

By the time we had stopped at the Visitor Center and driven out of the park, more rain had moved in. A pullout on Bureau of Land Management property was downright wet with puddles, but we stopped to check out News paper Rock.
"I wonder if any news about a government shutdown will be posted," Andy joked, but the only other tourist, a middle-aged man with a distinctly foreign accent, didn't get it. He stayed there in the rain, after I took his picture for him, hungrily reading the petroglyph news. I snapped three pictures of my own and dashed back to the car.  I'll read and study the ancient stories on my computer.
We had done the four hikes Andy wanted to complete. Tonight it can rain all it wants.