Ken's Journal
No. 4 - Summer 2004

Canyonlands and Arches National Parks, Moab UT - 07/21 - 07/25/2004
Days 25-29 on the road. Part IV.
 
 

Island in the Sky offers spectacular scenic overlooks of both the Needles and the Maze districts of Canyonlands. On good days, I'm told you can see mountain ranges 100 miles distant. During my stay there was always something of a haze obscuring long distance views. Island in the Sky also offers some great hikes! One I took was the Aztec Butte hike - only two miles roundtrip and 200 feet of elevation change.

 
The furthest butte in this shot is Aztec Butte. The hike takes you to the top where you'll find some well preserved Puebloan granaries.
  The hike is deceptively short and easy. The first few hundred yards are on a well packed, sandy trail through the sagebrush. For last part of the hike you follow cairns as you climb 200 feet up the side of the slickrock butte with a final scramble over the lip at the top.
 
The ancient Puebloans took advantage of the cavities carved by erosion under the lip at the top of the butte to build granaries.
Erosion leaves some strange shapes carved in the sandstone.
 
 

This is found just behind the roof support above - one of the well preserved granaries. The ancestral Puebloans would travel into this area from the south, hunting and collecting seeds along the way. What wasn't carried back home was left here in the granaries as stores to sustain future trips.

There are a half-dozen of these under the lip and one or two on the top that would have been covered with branches and skins.

  There are three ways to get down off the Island in the Sky. One is the normal, paved access road - 32 miles back to Moab. Second is the Shafer Trail, which I've already done. And the third is the Long Canyon Road - an easy 7.5 miles that takes about an hour. The road is a wide gravel road except through what the locals call Pucker Pass - very narrow and very steep. Except when damaged by rain or when wet, you could probably do this one in a 2wd high clearance vehicle.
 
Half-way through Pucker Pass. There's not much room here so keep your doors shut. Also stay to the inside - the drop-off will hurt you.
I'd guess that everyone who ever went under this rock has a picture of their vehicle in this position.
 
A view of the Manti-La Salle mountains from Long Canyon Road.
 
 

Next - Cheyenne Frontier Days, Cheyenne WY.
 
 

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