Celebrating the canyon country through the year

Ask people who live in San Juan County when to visit and most will name two windows, a few weeks in spring and a few in fall. The rest of the year has its own rewards for anyone who plans around the weather and pays attention to what the towns are doing.

Winter

January is the quietest month on Cedar Mesa, with snow on the high ground and nights well below freezing. It is also when Bluff holds its balloon festival over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, an event now in its second decade. Balloons lift off at dawn, an evening glow lights up the field, and spectators watch for free. Late winter is a good time to watch the community calendars in Bluff, Blanding and Monticello for slide talks on archaeology and research, film screenings and potluck suppers, which fill the slow weeks before the spring rush.

Spring

From March through May the canyons are at their most comfortable for walking, the cottonwoods leaf out along the San Juan River and the washes, and desert annuals bloom after a wet winter. Wind is the price. This is the busiest season for backpacking on Cedar Mesa, so overnight permits for popular weekends go early.

Summer nights

The heat of July and August pushes most visitors up onto the mesas or out onto the river, but the long evenings belong to the sky. Natural Bridges National Monument, at the northwest edge of Cedar Mesa, became the world’s first International Dark Sky Park in 2007, and the whole county is dark enough to show the Milky Way from a motel parking lot. Goosenecks State Park, near Mexican Hat, gives an open horizon above the entrenched bends of the San Juan. Summer is also monsoon season, and the afternoon storms over Elk Ridge are a show of their own.

Fall

The Utah Navajo Fair comes to Bluff each fall, with a rodeo, a powwow and a market for Native artists, and Utah.com’s guide to Bluff lists it among local events. The Navajo Nation’s own fair in Window Rock, Arizona, held in early September, is one of the largest Native fairs in the country. National Public Lands Day, on the fourth Saturday of September, brings trail and cleanup work days on federal land across the country. By late October the cottonwoods along the river have turned gold and the Kane Gulch Ranger Station shuts for the winter on October 31.

Food and crafts

Frybread turns up at almost every fair and many roadside stands, served with honey or as a Navajo taco piled with beans, meat and chile. Buying lunch from a family stand keeps a visitor’s money in the region about as directly as anything can.

Navajo weavers in the area still work on upright looms, basket makers produce the coiled ceremonial baskets used in Diné weddings, and potters at Towaoc, Colorado, carry on Ute Mountain Ute pottery. Buy from the maker or from a trader who can name the maker, since the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 makes it illegal to market goods falsely as Indian made. The Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding is a good place to see older and contemporary work side by side before shopping.

Ceremonies are a different matter. Some dances in Pueblo communities are open to respectful visitors and many are not, and each community sets its own rules on photography, recording and sketching. Where a rule is posted, it is usually a flat no.