Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

Well, if this isn't a bit bittersweet, revisiting Bears Ears just as the size of the monument--and of Grand Staircase-Escalante , another favorite stomping ground--is being slashed by an entity I shall not name. If you think these photos--or the others from my trips to these areas--show something special, maybe lift up your voice and let Congress know we aren't happy about this latest move. I try not to get political on this blog, but sometimes silence is not acceptable. Shrinking this monument and others in Utah is unacceptable.  Two years ago I spent a week backpacking Grand Gulch in the Bears Ears (see link above). This time I was in transit, and only had a few hours in the Monument. I made the most of them. Stop 1: Mule Canyon/House on Fire It was almost 4 p.m. when I headed up Mule Canyon on the 1 mile walk to House on Fire. The weather wasn't wholly cooperative. I almost turned back when it started to rain, but such desert showers don't usually last, and it didn...

Last week was a narrative photo post about our backpack trip through Grand Gulch in the Bears Ears National Monument. Today I'm sharing a bunch of the cool archaeology we saw there, with little comment and no order :)  Partly this is because I'm lazy, and partly because I don't have the knowledge to say much. The ruins and rock are are lumped together as "Ancestral Puebloan," but range in age from maybe 500 to 1800 years old. A stop at the museum in Blanding after the hike gave us some idea of the ages of some of the potsherds we saw, but I will need many repetitions to really get it sorted. Some ruins are pretty much inaccessible to ordinary mortals. I imagine rockfall has closed routes the original inhabitants used, but they were also definitely intrepid climbers. Other ruins were easily reached (if I got to them, they were easy). On this mud wall you can still see the handprints of the person who made it. I sat with that a while, thinking about the person who ...

I'm headed to the Bears Ears National Monument in a few weeks, so I figured I should do some more reading about the area. It's not new history to me, but a refresher never hurts, and many details were new. Title: The Bears Ears: A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness Author: David Roberts Publication Info: 2021, W.W. Norton. 336 pages. Source: Library Publisher's Blurb: The Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, created by President Obama in 2016 and eviscerated by the Trump administration in 2017, contains more archaeological sites than any other region in the United States. It’s also a spectacularly beautiful landscape, a mosaic of sandstone canyons and bold mesas and buttes. This wilderness, now threatened by oil and gas drilling, unrestricted grazing, and invasion by Jeep and ATV, is at the center of the greatest environmental battle in America since the damming of the Colorado River to create Lake Powell in the 1950s. In The ...