Here’s a quick slideshow I threw together with the photos I took during my 30-365 Photo Project. A little warning, it’s just over 9 minutes long. I guess a little late is better than never….
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Yellow Comet Alcove
On Saturday, Jackson and I headed back to the Moab area to hike to the Yellow Comet pictographs. After researching a way to reach them, I found that there were two different routes down into the canyon. The closest route is supposed to be difficult to find if you don’t already know where it is, plus there is supposed to be a very tricky section that I didn’t like the sound of. Luckily, I managed to find another route down into the canyon, but the hike in the canyon would be about 6 miles longer. A few weeks back I stopped by the area to see if I could find the route down and did manage to find it. This time, I parked the Jeep as close as I could to the route down and we set off on our hike.
It was a short cross-county hike to the way down. The route down is a very old constructed cow trail. At some point in the past, an unknown person created this trail by drilling holes into the sandstone and pounding in steel bars. Rock, stones, branches and dirt were used to build a trail on top of these steel bars. There’s not much left of the trail, but it was still possible for us to get down even if it was a little tricky in places.
After scrambling down some large boulders and steep scree the rest of the way, we were soon in the wash at the bottom and the rest of the hike was much easier.
After a few more miles we reached the large alcove that houses the Yellow Comet pictographs.
A photo of the panel with Jackson standing under it for scale…
Sunday, February 27, 2011
On Sunday the weather forecast called for 60% chance of snow in Moab. The same was true for Grand Junction and Moab on Saturday, so I figured they would be wrong again and I made my way over to Moab. It was a good decision because it turned out to be a perfect day for hiking……I’m glad I didn’t stay home… My destination for the day was to hike the Hidden Valley trail into the Behind the Rocks area to find some petroglyphs. This trail has been on my to-do list for a while, and now I regret not hiking it sooner. Besides being a nice hike, there were a bunch of petroglyphs to be found.
This is what a 60% chance of snow looks like in Hidden Valley…
One of the more interesting petroglyphs along the way…..a large shield-like figure with a smaller anthropomorph inside.
This panel contains the longest and straightest line of sheep I have come across so far.
These two figures look like they might be fighting.
As usual, there are plenty of bighorn sheep petroglyphs all around.
This line of small anthropomorphs reminds me of paper cutouts.
This bighorn has left some tracks behind.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Amanda and I headed up to the Grand Mesa for a few hours this afternoon. There was a ton of new snow up there and it was still coming down hard. The wind was blowing pretty good, too. Before heading back down we did stop at the Union Cafe for some burgers 🙂
Snow & Pine
Trees in a Snowstorm
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Bright and early Saturday morning, Amanda and I got up and headed west to the San Rafael Swell. We knew it was probably going to snow on us, but we didn’t realize just how much it was going to snow and for how long. We were meeting our friend Dave at the Rochester Creek Panel at 8:30am, and I gave us what I thought was plenty of time to get there. Unfortunately, once we reached the San Rafael Reef, we hit the snow. The interstate was covered, so driving was slower than I had planned. We finally made it to the Rochester Panel shortly after 9am, and I was expecting to find Dave waiting for us…..however he arrived about 20 minutes later because he got stuck driving slow in the snow much longer than we had, since he was coming from the Salt Lake area.
After he arrived we hiked over to the Rochester Panel in the snow. I pulled my camera out to take some photos and after a few minutes it was completely soaked, so I put it back away and didn’t really get any good photos there on this trip. When we returned back to the Jeep I grabbed my S90 and used that for the remainder of the trip 🙂
Our next stop was to visit the petroglyphs along the Moore Cutoff Road near the Molen Reef…
This is an interesting petroglyph on a nearby boulder that we found.
The Molen Reef towers above the large snake petroglyph in the snowstorm.
After finishing up there we bashed through the snow up into Short Canyon and then hiked the rest of the way. The snow was about 5-6″ deep at this point and had not let up on us once. We got soaked, but it was still a lot of fun….especially scrambling up to the rock art 🙂