June 26, 2003: Western Trip, Day 6
	June 24, 2003: Western Trip, Day 4
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It's Wednesday, and our plan is to head next to Canyonlands National Park to camp and do some hiking.

Driving to Monticello, UT

From Cortez, Colorado, we continued north on US Highway 491. It turned northwest and crossed into Utah, and after an hour's worth of driving we were in Monticello. Here, we turned north, getting back on US 191 and just outside of town the road began to rise and we got some excellent views of the landscape to the northwest- the direction we were going.

Click on the thumbnails below to have a look at the two pictures we took when we stopped at a viewpoint:

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Newspaper Rock

Our first point of interest today is to be a place called Newspaper Rock. This seems to be a trip for petroglyphs, and there are supposedly a lot of them there. And it's not out of our way; the stop is right on the way to Canyonlands National Park.

Getting to Newspaper Rock

Getting to Newspaper Rock was pretty easy, as was getting to Canyonlands NP. We just took US 191 north from Monticello about fifteen miles to the intersection with Utah 211 west. This is the road that goes to Canyonlands National Park. About twelve miles from US 191, the canyon narrowed, a creek appeared and we found Newspaper Rock. I've put an aerial view below:

What is Newspaper Rock?

Newspaper Rock is a State Historic Monument; it features a flat rock with one of the largest known collections of petroglyphs. The 200 square-foot rock is a part of the vertical Wingate sandstone cliffs that enclose the upper end of Indian Creek Canyon, and is covered by hundreds of ancient Indian petroglyphs (rock carvings)— one of the largest, best preserved and easily accessed groups in the Southwest. The petroglyphs have a mixture of human, animal, material and abstract forms, and to date no-one has been able to fully interpret their meaning.

The first carvings at the Newspaper Rock site were made around 2,000 years ago, left by people from the Archaic, Basketmaker, Fremont, and Pueblo cultures. These petroglyphs, pecked into these rocks, allow a glimpse of the life and world of the people who farmed the Puerco River Valley 650 to 2,000 years ago. In Navajo, the rock is called "Tse' Hane'" which translates to "a rock that tells a story." The petroglyphs were carved by Native Americans during both the prehistoric and historic periods. The drawings on the rock are of different animals, human figures, and symbols. These carvings include pictures of deer, buffalo, and pronghorn antelope. Some glyphs depict riders on horses. While precisely dating the rock carvings has been difficult, repatination of surface minerals reveals their relative ages. The reason for the large concentration of the petroglyphs is unclear, making the rock somewhat of a mystery.

The rock face is located near a stream and trail in an area with long expanses of otherwise impassable vertical cliffs. The setting is peaceful and sheltered, as the canyon at this point is quite narrow, overgrown by bushes and tall cottonwood trees, with the clear waters of the creek flowing close to the road, and sheer reddish cliffs rising 250 feet above. A picnic area and campground are located across the road (although flash flood dangers caused the closing of the campground in 2006). Other places on the cliffs to the south have smaller groups of petroglyphs, but they are harder to find.

Our Visit to Newspaper Rock

We parked the car and followed the short trail over to the rock face, and then along the face for a hundred feet or so to the rock itself. Here, we found an amazing array of all kinds of petroglyphs, more than we had ever seen in one place. Most of them were individually quite small, but the rock face was covered with them. We spent a good deal of time just admiring them and walking around. Below are thumbnails for six of the best pictures we took here; click on them to view this amazing collection of petroglyphs:

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Canyonlands NP: On the Chesler Park Trail

From Newspaper Rock we are off to Canyonlands National Park.

Getting to Canyonlands National Park

Utah Highway 211 is the access road for Canyonlands National Park; indeed, the highway ends there at the park. So we really couldn't get lost as we headed further along the highway after leaving Newspaper Rock. When the highway opened up through some developed areas, the road surface turned into that kind of rough, gravelly kind of surface, although it was still a very good road.

Another ten miles up the road, I was passed by a truck coming in the opposite direction, and, it passed, a rock got thrown up and smashed into my windshield. The windshield didn't break, but there was a starburst and a crack coming from it. As the day progressed, both Fred and I noticed that the crack was slowly progressing across the windshield. As it turned out, I had to have the windshield replaced the following day in Moab, Utah.

But anyway, it was another forty-five minutes or an hour and we were coming in to Canyonlands National Park through the entrance station. The first thing we did was to investigate camping and pick out a space, which we did without any difficulty. There were many other campers here, but it was the middle of the week and so we found a good space pretty quickly. I'll postpone pictures of the campsite until later.

We sat at the picnic table and looked through the trail descriptions in the brochure, and picked out a longish trail to do this afternoon- the Chesler Park Trail.

On the Chesler Park Trail

For our hike this afternoon, we've settled on the Chesler Park Loop/Joint Trail.

This 11-mile hike will begin at the Elephant Hill Trailhead. Hiking three miles along this trail will bring us to a saddle overlooking Chesler Park, a scenic expanse of desert grasses and shrubs surrounded by colorful sandstone spires. We'll descend into Chesler Park and then make a loop around it. This trail is supposed to be fairly level, but wind through a series of deep, narrow fractures in a section called the Joint Trail. We expect to work up an appetite.

We got our campsite secured and left a cooler on the picnic table to confirm that it was taken (although the receipt we'd gotten at the sign-up board and displayed on a clip by the campsite number would have been sufficient). Before we left, I had Fred take a picture of me with the sandstone cliffs across from our campsite as a backdrop. You can see that picture here.

The day was warming up quickly, and the pause to do some picture-taking led me to conclude that for this hike this afternoon, I'd be more comfortable in shorts, so I went back to the tent to change. Later on, I was glad I had. Then we got in the car and drove up the gravel road to the Elephant Hill Trailhead.

Aside from Chesler Park itself, the "joints" and a couple of other features, I can't really tie the photos to particular locations on the trail map, so I won't try. What I will do is try to describe the trail as best I can recollect it, with some help from a couple of hiking trail websites on the Internet. Where I can, I'll be specific with the pictures we took, but otherwise I'll just show you groups of them every so often. So let's head out.

After leaving Elephant Hill the trail followed the ridge above Elephant Canyon for a while and then turned west. The ridge was a fantasyland of needles and pinnacles, and the trail followed a twisting route through the confused landscape. After we intersected the trail coming from Squaw Flat, we entered a steep, rocky section of trail that came out on the sandy bottom of Elephant Canyon. There were supposed to be some springs here, and we did find one or two small pools- but no flowing water like a creek or anything. We weren't in the bottom of the canyon very long before we found a sign directing us to Chesler Park. This led us to climb out of Elephant Canyon to a rock plateau.

Click on the thumbnails below to see some of the pictures we took on this part of the hike:

All along Elephant Canyon, and after we intersected with the Devil's Kitchen Trail to head west to Chesler Park, we were walking through an incredibly beautiful area. There was one interesting rock formation after another, and the trail wound up, down, around and through them. The pictures at right are representative of the amazing rock formations that we encountered; you can look at the full-size pictures by clicking on the thumbnails. After another mile or so of hiking, the trail climbed up through a narrow opening (shown with a formation called "The Pinnacles" in the background) and we were on the northern edge of Chesler Park.

After hiking through such a jumble of vertical sandstone monoliths and wind-sculpted curved rock formations, we were indeed surprised to find what looked like a flat, sandy meadowland, surrounded by banded sandstone formations and with a few spires pretty much in the middle of it.

Chesler Park is about a mile in diameter and is almost completely surrounded by towering needles of pink sandstone.

Before 1964 this area was used by the Dugout Ranch as a grazing pasture for cattle; an old cowboy camp can still be seen on the southern side of the park. There was even a dirt landing strip in the meadow, although all evidence of it is gone now, with Chesler Park having been reclaimed by sandy soil desert shrubs.

But what formed the park in the first place? Was it an ancient sinkhole that gradually filled with sand? Was it caused by shifting salt beds in the Paradox Formation below it? I'm not sure anyone knows.

Soon after dropping into Chesler Park the trail meets another path that circles the perimeter of the park. We turned right here and continued south and west below the impressive spires of the Pinnacle. We could have taken either a clockwise or counterclockwise route around Chesler Park; we chose the former. So we basically worked our way around the park, with a short side trip out to the spires in the middle the park.

As we continued around the eastern side of Chesler Park, we climbed up and down out of the passageways through the rock walls surrounding it, and got a lot of interesting pictures. You can see some of these by clicking on the thumbnails below:

It was amazing to me how the sides of Chesler Canyon were lined with hundreds of stone needles- all constructed of the same banded sandstone. It looked like a terrestrial pin cushion. At one point in our walk, eagle-eye Fred spotted one of Chesler Park's inhabitants, peering out at us from the underbrush. It was a very beautiful part of the hike.

The next mile of the hike turned out to be the most interesting part. As we climbed out of Chesler Canyon to the southern edge of Chesler Park, we came to another obstacle- a wall of heavily eroded sandstone. This barrier forms the southern wall of Chesler Park, and in order to get through it the trail is forced into a series of cracks and fissures. This section of trail is called the Joint Trail, because old-timers often refer to cracks in the sandstone as "joints". At one point we had to walk through the bottom of a joint that was nearly 300 yards long and, at times, less than two feet wide. At other times, we found that the joint was blocked by boulders, and we found it necessary to clamber over them. Below are thumbnails for some of the pictures that we took in the joints here on this part of the trail. They are very interesting, and you can click on the little images to view them:

The trail emerged from the sandstone wall at the bottom of a long flight of crude stone steps that climb back to the sunshine and blue sky on the southwestern edge of Chesler Park. From here, we could look back on the rock formations concealing the Joint Trail, and they looked for all the world like giant toadstools.

This brought us to the remains of an old jeep road, and we walked north along it before the trail took us back around the northern wall of Chesler Park, and basically back to the point where we had entered right by the rock pinnacle that marked our entrance point into Chesler Park. From there, we followed essentially the same path back to the Elephant Hill Trailhead.

This was an amazing hike; while all of it was beautiful and interesting, the joints were indeed the high point. We would not again encounter such interesting formations until our hikes through the slot canyons near Palm Springs, California six years in the future.

We arrived back at the car at the Elephant Hill Trailhead about six hours after we'd started out. We'd taken some water with us but still, we were parched when we returned. It was a pleasure to get back to the campsite and have a cold drink. It was getting dark by the time Fred had dinner ready and I'd set up the inside of the tent. It was a great end to a great day of hiking.

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	June 26, 2003: Western Trip, Day 6
	June 24, 2003: Western Trip, Day 4
	Return to the Index for Our Western Trip