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Grand Gulch
The Echoes of Defining Voices
The ranger at the Kane Gulch trailhead, a 17-year veteran of the place, explained to me how traffic at Cedar Mesa - "the premier area in Utah to see the ruins of the prehistoric Anasazi Indians," according to David Day in Utah's Favorite Hiking Trails - has exploded in the past 10 years. I had always heard of Grand Gulch referred to with almost reverence - a place thick with ruins and off the beaten path. When we arrived at the Kane Gulch trailhead the newness of the facility surprised me. I expected a BLM trailer stuck in the middle of cactus and juniper. Instead, I found a solid building, flag flying high in the foreground, and trail markers pointing us into the gulch. Apparently, the pull of the mysterious lures more than just the occasional hiker. The secret is out.
GULCH is defined as: A narrow gorge with a stream running through it. A divide. In the case of Grand Gulch in southeastern Utah, the definition is natural, historical, and mental.
Naturally, the gulch is indeed grand. Curving, as a river does, down the path of least resistance, it snakes around jutting, high walls of varnished-streaked sandstone from which it has been carved - classic southern Utah.
Historically, Grand Gulch protects the remains of civilizations that date as far back as 6500 B.C., according to the BLM. The civilizations to whom most of the pottery shards, corn cobs, kivas, granaries, and ruins are attributed come from earlier times closer to 750 A.D. to 1300 A.D., but proof of the Basketmaker eras from 1500 B.C. to 750 A.D. abounds.
Mentally, the gulch widens by the attempt to fit all these pieces together and make sense of them. The pictographs and petroglyphs stand out clearly upon the walls. The well-preserved ruins allow me to picture the children running down the trails of the gulch gathering berries, playing with their friends. I can almost see the young men walking the gulch with bows and arrows, shoving one another playfully as they search for game. The women grind corn into meal below the red-rock ledges - warm sand at their feet, and the cooking fires deposit the black soot still visible along the roof lines of the small stick and adobe rooms.
What is now a small snaking stream, often dry, must have at one time been a gushing water way. The vision left by the Native American ruins found around almost every south-facing corner of Grand Gulch, blossoms with a civilization that must have been a bustling thoroughfare. The ruins found high on the wall tease the mind with wondering at their need for lookout points and defenses, not to mention the brain teaser of how they scaled overhanging cliffs to enter the upper echelons of their homes.
The mental gulch is a gap we will never close - trying to find the bridge between what was and what we imagine to have been. We do not and cannot know what the petroglyphs mean. Everyone - archeologist, scientist, Joe hiker - all have their theories. Ranging from silly to serious, they are all just I-wonder-if. For instance, I compare the simplicity of the drawings on these walls that date to, say, 1300 A.D., to the paintings being created in Europe shortly after that time - Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michalangelo in 1400 A.D. Could it truly be that the inhabitants of the Americas were so far behind in artistic technique and language? Are these simple symbols something akin to a street sign to indicate where good hunting might be found? A story board? A family history marker?
A fellow backpacker posed the tongue-in-cheek theory that the broken pot shards laying at the base of the cliffs around the homes came from tribes using pots as artillery when enemies approached. The mental picture of the Native Americans perched on the upper ledges throwing their pots onto the heads of attackers made me giggle, and I had to admit that one theory is practically as good as the next. I mean, why, really, are most of the pots broken into shards no bigger than a few inches long? There must have been hundreds, even thousands, of pots scattered along the base of these ruins and along the outlying deserts. The theories go on, and canyon hikers will continue to ponder the possibilities. The mystery is grand. The haunting of the unknowable by very nature does not rest.
Voices of the ancients whisper to us as we travel Grand Gulch, Kane Gulch, and Bullet Canyon. The voices of the rock and the creation of the gulch itself, carved by the knives of time and water; the voice of history teasing with clues but hiding the story as only time can; and mentally, we impose the whispers of our own minds, our own theories, striving to bridge the gulch of the unknown. The nature of the explorer is to listen, to see what you can hear in the echo of the defining voices. And so we explore.
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