Cedar Mesa and Pueblos

This weekend we went out and hiked down in the four corners area of Utah, where we were at was probably about 100 miles from the closest town. We drove down and camped late Friday night, then woke up on Saturday and did 18 miles round trip. Nate's friend knew of a couple ruins, petroglyphs and rock art panels, so we got to look at a lot of really neat Pueblo ruins.

Nate's friend volunteers with an archaeological society, so he's been to a lot of different sites in the area. Apparently when the Pueblos left this region, they left behind pots and all sorts of other things planning to come back some day.

The swirls on this are supposed to represent migration. I'm not too sure what everything else represents.

 Elk.

 Check out the hand prints above the doorway.

Bigger picture.

 Pottery shards with some arrowheads. There were also corn cobs all over the place.

Nate inside one of the ruins. 

 Here I am having fun exploring.

 Nate's friends. The guy on the right brought his camera and took a lot of pictures.

This is from the large rock panel that we went to see, the moving man is pretty unusual for puebloan art.

Quail.

 

This one is called owl face. Creepy.

 

 This was our end goal, a really neat 2-story ruin on a rock ledge. If Nate's friend didn't know where it was, then we probably would have walked by on the canyon floor without even knowing!

 

  Cactus flowers.

 

We saw a lot of lizards.

 

This morning we drove to the end of the mesa top. It felt like we were at the end of the earth with the big cliffs and deep canyons.

All in all we had a really fun time exploring southern Utah!