Southeast Utah and the Four Corners
Field notes on the Cedar Mesa and Bears Ears country: what the canyons hold, who looks after them, and the rules and roads a visitor meets on the way in.
Rock art in the dry canyons has outlasted centuries because rain, frost and hands rarely reached it, and for the Hopi Tribe and other Pueblo peoples much of it still carries meaning. Touching, chalking, wetting or tracing a panel speeds its loss, and on public land defacing one is a federal offense.
Public lands and conservation
Visiting with respect
Visiting with respect
Before a first trip
The canyons of southeast Utah hold one of the densest archaeological records in the United States: dwellings, granaries, rock art, tools and the dry leftovers of meals, some of it two thousand years old and much of it lying where it was left. They are also ancestral ground for the Hopi, Zuni and other Pueblo peoples, and home country for Navajo and Ute families today. A visit here is a visit to someone’s history, and almost everything this publication covers follows from that.
For a first visit, begin with three pieces. Visiting with respect sets out the attitude the place asks for. Tips for visiting cultural sites with respect turns it into practice, from walls and middens to photographs and geotags. Monitoring sites: a citizen’s role explains how the people who know these canyons best help watch over them.
The rest sits in three sections. Visiting with respect covers permits, roads, seasons and conduct. Archaeology and rock art looks at what the dry alcoves preserved and how it is studied. Public lands and conservation follows the monument, the agencies and the tribes, with every decision dated. No page gives the location of any site, and none ever will.
Permits, roads, seasons and the conduct cultural sites ask for.
What the dry canyons kept, how it is studied and how to look without harm.
The monument, the agencies and tribes, and the land decisions, dated.