Surreal Mystery

Bears Ears XXV

2024-06-01

We had been up early, hiked the canyon and visited the Fish Mouth cave and ruins, here in southeastern Utah. Visiting the ruins was enriching. Afterwards, we spent the heat of the day, relaxing and resting from our excursions.

The afternoon was spent listening to the sound of insects, while we rested and waited for the air to cool off again. The sun has been getting more and more uncomfortable in the afternoon. The desert is getting hotter. Without clothing, this warmth feels good, but as the seasons change, it will become to feel like too much of a good thing.

We now know that this being comfortably naked in the heat of the day won’t last long, because the Weather Service says that it will get hotter Thursday.

When the time comes, before dinner, we have decided to explore the area around camp and the road behind us. For miles around, there are no other people. None have been seen driving on the so called main road, all afternoon. It is a desolate looking conveyance which dips so much that it is a motor homes nightmare. There are pockets of deep dust that would swallow the tires of a conventional sedan.

We are around a half mile back on a tributary to that that appears to go to nowhere in particular. There is no concern to keep nearby cover-ups around, let alone any clothing. We can go for an unburdened walk as far as we care without concerns.

There is a ring of rock wall across the way. There is a beautiful natural look with a tree, where moister drains and accumulates, but a rancher has been using it for a corral. The vegetation is eaten and trampled inside and littered with paddies, so it quickly loses our interest.

There is also an arch on the rock wall across the wash behind us with something unnatural on it, perhaps petroglyphs. When I take out the new binoculars there is sadness, as they show us that the art is only vandal’s graffiti. Probably the legacy of some foolish boys out on a maybe drunken camping trip, years ago. We’ll stay away from that, too.

There is the continuation of this dirt track that led us out to our campsite. There is a circle here, but as it runs along the wash, it disappears into some brush next to some pillow-like rocks.

We start walking, just to see what is there, or where it goes. It quickly becomes a 4×4 situation at a dip where the sand has accumulated and then washed away during the hard rains. You must straddle the deep dusty soft beach sand, searching for hard rocks. We search for harder pack. The dry beach-like sand is difficult to trudge through.

The condition of the one set of tracks there, tells us that rarely anyone comes through here. At first, it looks as though this ends, but there is more after a short hill. The road continues as dust in the desert, until it winds uphill into a solid rock surface.

We realize that this surface is a big bedrock. We are rising up and around, up to the top of the tall cliff face across from our camp.

In the distance we see that the road bends east and then goes back into the soft sandy desert as before. We speculate that it winds around the bend for cattle rancher use. We might walk through more of the dust, but something more curious is up the rock slope to the west. Rocks are strewn like cast pebbles everywhere. 

What’s more, they are granite and in odd shaped pieces. For days, we have been seeing sandstone of all kinds, but this is volcanic and seems out of place.

Is it just the remains of a layer of volcanic slew? It is oddly strewn, as if these were cast for miles through the sky and landed haphazardly here. The wavy smooth surface is peppered with these.

They are like modern art sculptures displayed in a surreal fashion, each as if an individual display in a gallery.

Many are balanced on tiny underpinnings, or pedestals.

Colorful lichen is attached to several.

They catch the late afternoon light, casting definitive shadows.

I wonder how this came to be, as I wander in this surreal, other worldly, moonscape.

I have heard of rocks traveling, sliding, being pushed, during storms in Death Valley. These seem to have moved. Some accumulate together at the base of slopes.

Others seem to defy conventional experience.

Similarly sized stones pile up in a group in a bowl, not different sizes as might be expected, but looking more like a mosaic.

There are groups of pebbles in sand, or just lying on the bedrock. They are perfectly round.

They show up everywhere like rabbit raisins, from BB size to deer droppings.

I photograph our campsite far below, under the shade of our tree.

Continuing over the smooth ridge, we follow the mild slope for a while.

Up higher, two fellows sit on a slippery slope. A third has fallen off long before this. These two pieces of stone await their fate, oblivious it would seem. Another day passes toward the inevitable fall. I can project life onto these two, as a member of a human race. Many humans to, are seemingly oblivious to their peril, they watch the sun setting.

The grand vista at this height with a setting sun in a clear sky is bedazzling.

We walk over sculpted sandstone. A series of holes have to be considered as possible dinosaur tracks, about the same geological level and type of surface as the famous larger ones up the road, just a few miles.

There is still much that is pristine.

Dwarfed trees find a life in the cracks of a rock surface.

Small shrubs survive and accumulate in an island of sand to perch on.

There is a spiritual air about this experience. Someone has created a pile in the shape of a cross, perhaps finding a feeling of being closer to God.

Dressed to a bare minimum, we brought no flashlights and have a lack of pockets.

There are dangerous critters that come out in the darker cooler evening. We must head back, reluctantly. 

We have a quick dinner. As the stars appear, we are reading Edward Abbey to each other, again in bed, before sleep.  

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