On Monday Chris and I noticed some granaries in Nine Mile Canyon that we couldn’t get to from our location and we didn’t have time to find a way there, so we returned for a short and easy trip on Wednesday to check them out. First we did a short hike up a side canyon to see some other granaries I’d discovered nearly ten years earlier.
Dry-laid walls
Big overhang with granaries
More dry-laid walls
Granary
Granary
View out of the alcove
Next we drove to the little canyon where we’d climbed up to some rock art two days earlier. We had some sort of idea of how to get up the opposide side to the ledges containing the granaries but it wasn’t clear from below how easy it would be. We would climb one ledge and then traverse it looking for a weakness in the next one, repeating the process until we thought we were on the correct level, seeing a few petroglyphs and pictographs along the way. The ledge with the granaries wasn’t visible during any of the climb up so we weren’t sure we were on the correct level until we rounded the corner.
Climbing up through the ledges
Petroglyphs along the way
Petroglyph
Chris after climbing a bigger ledge
Wavy pictograph lines
Approaching the granaries
The granaries were all in a rough state of ruin but there was enough left intact to see that some of them were relatively large. Some of the adobe still showed finger impressions from the people who constructed them, and there was a surprising amount of corn cobs–there was easily more corn at this one site than I’ve seen in all of my 35+ trips to Nine Mile combined.
Granary
Chris in front of a collapsed granary
Fingerprints in adobe
Corn cob
Many corn cobs
Granary
Adobe and rock layers
Adobe and rock layers
Small granary
Almost completely ruined granary
We climbed and scrambled back down to the canyon floor and then drove back to my house. It was a short day because Chris had to be in Salt Lake that afternoon to take care of some other business for a couple of days before flying back to Germany. Hopefully it won’t be another three years before I see him again–we’ve already got tentative plans for a pretty big hike late next summer…
Low rock wall above the crux of the climb
Chris descending the crux
Photo Gallery: Willkommen Zurück Part 3: Unfinished Business in Nine Mile