Utah Anasazi Canyon Hike - Mule Canyon Seven Towers Ruins

Utah Trip April 2014-1 Mule Canyon Seven Towers Ruins

© Joe Berardi books are available at amazon.com

I ended up making two road trips to Utah during April 2014 and this is the trip report for the first trip.

Cedar Mesa – Anasazi Ruins

The goal for this trip was to find, explore and photograph Anasazi Ruins in the Cedar Mesa area. On my previous March trip to the area I concentrated on exploring the Comb Ridge ruins and also taking in a few hikes outside the Comb Ridge area too.

Day 1

Travel / Mule Canyon Seven Towers Ruins

I drove to Blanding, Utah and immediately headed for the campground at Natural Bridges National Monument. I stopped at the visitor center and was told there were only three openings about an hour earlier with the check-in at the campground.

 This was one of those “I just made it moments”, I found campsite #10 open and paid for five nights. I had stayed in that spot before and was very happy to get it again. It was about 4:00 PM local time and getting kind of late for finding a place to stay for the night.

I normally don’t like hiking much on a travel day but wanted to squeeze in this low priority hike. I headed out for Mule Canyon Seven Towers. I never been there before but was expecting a short drive down a dirt road and a short hike. I arrived at the gate near MP102 and proceeded through it and found a rough road but managed to make it to the drill-hole site and camping spot. With my Cedar Mesa 2014 Canyon Atlas in hand and a few loose updates I headed for the trailhead. Like many places there were no signs, register or toilets but I used the GPS to guide my way. I walked the 4WD jeep trail to the end and picked up a pedestrian trail at the end. It didn’t take long to find the remains of several towers with only one having any significant amount of the wall still standing.  When the rock walls collapse it creates a pile of rocks along the original structure and sometimes the pile is only a foot or two high other times several feet or more of the original wall remains standing with rocks piled on both sides of the wall.

I snapped photos and decided this was a morning shoot and the long late afternoon shadows were killing the photo opportunities. I snooped around looking for more ruins and knew there were some in the canyon not just the towers on top of the rim. I located some other towers across the canyon and decided to go around the ravine. Again most of the ruins were mere rock piles but there was one significant structure wall (15 feet) still standing with a nice opening in the wall at the bottom. Again the backside with the chaotic rock pile was lit by the sun with a dark shadow splitting the tower into two. I recorded the GPS points for each ruins so some of them will end up in the Cedar Mesa /Comb Ridge 2014 Canyon Atlas.

I ended up setting up the tripod for some self portrait shots. I was running out of daylight and was rushing the photo-shoot. I started this trip report two months ago and only now finishing it so I had to look at the photos taken and my trip notes to refresh my memory.  From the photographer’s point of view it was poor lighting and I didn’t want to stay for sunset since I had big plans for the next day. Looking back across the canyon (east) I could see several alcoves with ruins. I start thinking about if there was an easy way down to them and then I continued shooting because I was running out of daylight. I make back to the pickup about 7:00 PM local time and headed back to the campground.