August 18-23, 2022

After gladly leaving northern Utah behind we found ourselves camped in Big Wash, just up Gate Canyon from Nine Mile Canyon. I never would have expected to land here at the onset of this trip, but it turned out to be a great decision and the area was by far more fun than any we’d camped at previously this year. We set up camp on Thursday evening and only saw two vehicles pass by in the five days we were there.

New camp spot in Big Wash

The evening that we arrived I began to scour the satellite imagery in Google Earth to check out our new surroundings. Almost immediately I spotted what looked like a ruin on a nearby butte. The next morning I located it through binoculars while sitting in the camp trailer, and obviously that’s where I planned to hike on Friday after work. I drove as close as I could on a dirt road and then began hiking. There was some weird shit going on near the end of the road: sandbags full of soil and rocks, and strange piles of rocks and logs.

Bags of rocks and soil

The butte

Rock pile

Rocks on a log

I expected some difficulty getting to the top of the butte but it was pretty easy, albeit steep. I walked across the flat top of the butte and I was still a little surprised by what I saw. The ruin was a circular, dry-laid structure similar to those I’d seen on Horse Bench. Except the butte wasn’t easily defensible since it was accessible from three sides, and the ruin had an obvious opening/doorway on one side unlike those others. So I’m going to call this one historic, but everything I know I learned from the internet so take that for what it’s worth.

Climbing a ridge

Final bit of climbing

On top of the butte

The structure

The structure

The structure

The camp trailer viewed from the butte

On Saturday Traci and I took the dogs down Gate Canyon and into Nine Mile Canyon. I drove very slowly down Gate Canyon and used binoculars a lot to look for inscriptions I hadn’t seen before, and I did find several. We ate lunch at the Daddy Canyon picnic tables, then headed back toward camp. It had rained over Gate Canyon while we were out and we saw some minor flooding on the way back to the trailer.

Everett Murphy inscription in Gate Canyon

Lavinia Curtis, Alma Jensen, Verona Ewell

J.O. Fielding, Glnnwood, May 23th, 1889

Nevro 1857

Lunch at Daddy Canyon

Rainbow over Big Wash

I left Boulder and Loa with Traci on Sunday and went for a hike to a very cool ruin that wasn’t terribly far away. I’d learned about it a couple of years earlier and had even driven past it a couple of times, but never felt like hiking to it until now. It’s an easy hike to get somewhat close, but it seems difficult to climb up the last little bit to the ruin. I thought I saw a good way up but didn’t dare attempt it alone.

Wash leading to the ruin

Superior light beer 😀

Below the butte

Ruin atop the butte

W.W.N. 1945

Wall on the edge

Ruin atop the butte

Ruin

On my way back to camp I did a little hiking in Gate Canyon to see some places up close that I’d noticed the previous day. At one such area I found an inscription from 1860 which is another of the oldest I’ve ever seen in the Nine Mile Canyon area.

Max Leonard, Explorer & Trapper, Passed Here in 1860

Max Leonard, Explorer & Trapper, Passed Here in 1860 (DStretch version)

JEFf

After work on Monday I visited an area a friend had told me about more than eight years earlier. He said there were petroglyphs there but didn’t send any photos or really describe them. In the same area I knew (based on the background scenery) there was a petroglyph of a large, curly-tailed deer that I’d seen in a Deseret News article many years earlier. I hiked all over the area on Monday afternoon and found so much more than I bargained for. At first I saw a couple of decent petroglyph panels. As I hiked up to the next cliff band I noticed a rattlesnake curled up between some rocks, but it didn’t seem to care about me and I passed by quietly. Beyond the snake were some excellent Fremont petroglyph panels.

View up toward some pretty great rock art

Curvilinear petroglyphs

Person fending off an animal?

Snek

Strange lines connecting animal figures

Lots of lines and figures

Line of sheep

Very cool elongated figures

I got cliffed out in the direction I’d been traveling, so I reversed course and went back the other way. The snake was gone, which was a little unnerving, but I was glad I’d left the dogs with Traci for this hike. Next I encountered some stick figure petroglyphs that I recognized from another friend’s Facebook post, and it also turned out these were the ones my friend had told me about eight years earlier. Unfortunately they’d been chalked, but that was probably well before modern camera and computer technology made that unnecessary.

Sheep and deer?

Stick people

Stick man

Stick people

A short distance away from the stick figures I found the curly-tailed deer that I’d been after for so long! I took a different route back down to the paved road and saw several other good panels. In all I’d only spent about an hour in the area and had seen some of the best petroglyphs in the canyon! It was certainly better than any day I could have spent in northern Utah!

Large, curly-tailed deer and bighorn sheep

Double arc

Possibly snake heads

Elk(?) and sheep

Pair of horned figures

Dots and a net

Trailer in Big Wash

I took Tuesday off work, which gave us all day to drive the short distance home. Since I’d already driven the truck down and back up Gate Canyon several times I knew taking the camp trailer down toward home would be no problem. We reached the paved road in Nine Mile Canyon and in a couple of hours we were home. The trip had started out okay, it was a little rough in the middle, and had a happy ending!

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Photo Gallery: Big Wash to Nine Mile