San Rafael Swell | Udink.org

November 7, 2025

On Friday I poked around Cottonwood and Huntington creeks near their confluence. There are a couple of cabins visible in Google Earth that I wanted to see so I planned a relatively short seven mile loop hike going down Cottonwood Creek and then up Huntington Creek. I parked near the confluence of Cottonwood and Rock Canyon creeks, and as I was preparing to hike the sun rose above the horizon and cast a pink glow over the Wasatch Plateau to the west. I descended a short but steep and bouldery slope to Rock Canyon Creek. I knew I’d have to cross creeks at least three times so I came prepared with water shoes in my pack, but luckily the first crossing was just a trickle that I could step over. The air was quite chilly and getting my feet wet would have been pretty miserable that early in the morning. After almost a mile I reached the first cabin, a wooden structure with a caved-in roof.

Pink light to the west

Hunter Power Plant

Rock Canyon Creek

Tiny stream in Rock Canyon Creek

Log cabin

Collapsed roof

Joints

I continued down the floodplain of Cottonwood Creek where, in the satellite imagery, furrows were still visible, but on the ground I couldn’t see any indication that this ground was ever cultivated. It’s been so long since it was farmed that sagebrush has reclaimed the bottom lands. I came to my next water crossing, at Cottonwood Creek this time, and where I first reached the creek it was deep, wide, and muddy, backed up behind a beaver dam. A few minutes of walking downstream brought me to a shallow spot where I barely got my shoes wet hopping across the slightly submerged rocks.

Old road

Cultivated land reclaimed by sagebrush

Cottonwood Creek floodplain

Deep crossing of Cottonwood Creek

More manageable crossing of Cottonwood Creek

The last stretch down Cottonwood to its confluence with Huntington Creek didn’t show much promise in the sat imagery so I took a shortcut across the ridge dividing the two creeks. On the other side of the ridge was a stone retaining wall that really puzzled me. It looked like it was built to shore up a road, but I couldn’t see any reason a road would need to be elevated there–the ground level at the base of the retaining wall seemed plenty high above the creek to avoid any rare flood event. A large boulder nearby had what could have been a pit structure at its base, and copious amounts of cow shit and lithic flakes all around it, but unfortunately no writings.

Cattle trail between Cottonwood and Huntington creeks

On the divide between creeks

Old Huntington Creek meander

Retaining wall–but for what?

Retaining wall

Possible pit structure against a boulder

Boulder overhang

Out in the middle of a former meander of Huntington Creek was a nice stone cabin, this one also missing its roof, but its walls were still in good shape. Nearby was a pile of rock rubble that may once have been another structure, and a small square structure that I’d guess was an outhouse. On the upstream side of the meander were more retaining walls, but also some buried vertical slabs, which clued me in that they were probably built as part of an irrigation ditch. It still seemed odd that between stretches of retaining walls there were sections with no walls and no signs there was ever a ditch.

Stone cabin

Rubble pile near the stone cabin

Smaller structure near the stone cabin

Slab retaining wall

Retaining wall

No retaining wall here

More retaining wall

Slightly raised section

I continued upstream for another mile and a half, sometimes staying low along the creek bank and other times going up and down the many hills looking for pit houses. I found a barely used metate on one of those hilltops but no pit houses. On a hill in the middle of another abandoned meander there was a collapsed fireplace and chimney with a lot of trash surrounding it. I assume a cabin once stood here but has burned down. I’d planned on ending the creekside part of the hike at this point so I headed cross-country straight back to Cottonwood Creek and to the truck, a distance of just under two miles. The final creek crossing was much like the previous one, where at first the creek was deep but after some bushwhacking upstream I found a much easier place to cross on foot. On the other side was a corral that had two old washing machines lying around.

Huntington Creek

Metate on a hilltop

On a hill above Huntington Creek

Knapped piece of chert

Partially collapsed chimney

Broken glass, ceramics, and metal

Cattle trail back to Cottonwood Creek

Section marker

Deep section of Cottonwood Creek

Easy crossing of Cottonwood Creek

Corral alongside the creek

Old washing machine

Another old washing machine

Private property signs on BLM land

I ate lunch at the truck and still had plenty of time left for some additional exploring. I stopped at some graves marked on the USGS topo map (supposedly those of some residents of the former town of Wilsonville) that I’d first visited in 2007 while finding a geocache. Next I attempted to find some footprint petroglyphs that a friend had told me about ten years earlier. He’d heard about them from an old cowboy and had looked already once with no luck. I used his description and identified several likely spots using Google Earth, and I started my search at the very most likely spot. The petroglyphs were supposed to be at ground level on horizontal rock surfaces, and one area had many such rocks scattered around, covering about two acres. I hiked in a back-and-forth search pattern, using my GPS to keep track of the rows I walked and ensuring I didn’t get too close to or far away from previous passes. I covered the entire area and only saw one petroglyph (possibly archaic) and a few pecked areas that were probably manmade, but not the petroglyphs I was looking for.

Graves near Wilsonville

Hunter Power Plant and solar panels

Parked near power lines

Petroglyph, maybe archaic

Then I hiked to the remaining five sites that I thought had some potential, and after coming up empty at the first four I didn’t have high expectations for the last one, but when I first spotted an inscription from a distance my hopes rose! I got closer and could see that there were very many inscriptions, and also the petroglyphs I was after. The location was quite unusual, not the typical sort of spot where one would find petroglyphs or inscriptions, though the inscriptions could certainly be explained simply due to the presence of the petroglyphs. I returned to the truck, which was only a short distance away despite me having covered two miles in the search for the rock art, and decided to call it a day and drove back home.

Bill B.