Fall 2026 Travels: Four Corners, Petroglyphs, and Remote Sites
Sorry it’s been a while since I shared anything here. I have been so busy! Let me try to give you a quick recap.
Late September and early October, I spent three weeks in the Four Corners region. There were several things all happening in the area that I wanted to participate in and I decided since I wasn’t working I might as well just stay and do several of them. That included…
Volunteering to help at a weekend training in Monticello for the Visit With Respect Ambassador program
The head of the program sent out a call looking for existing trained volunteers to come help train this season’s new batch. The assignment was to help with some role playing exercises by pretending to be tourists in various situations. For some reason, though, things changed completely between the time we volunteered and the day of the training, and we weren’t needed after all. So that kinda sucked - spending several hours of travel and a hundred bucks for a hotel, all for nothing. Well, I guess not nothing; it was nice to have a refresher, but I had another mandatory refresher just a couple weeks later by Zoom. So now I’m doubly refreshed, I guess.
A few days traveling around the Bears Ears area
My personal goal was to see more duck head anthropomorph petroglyphs, but I also wanted to do some Visit With Respect ambassadorizing by walking a few trails to check up on conditions and answer visitor questions. I ended up doing more driving than hiking, though. But on the plus side, I visited the two most remote archaeology sites in the region we cover.
Raft trip on the Upper San Juan
Sadly this got canceled. It was going to be one of the perqs of being a VWR Ambassador, but not enough other volunteers were available (and interested) that day.
Four day conference in Cortez
It was time for the Colorado Archaeological Society’s annual meeting. This year they expanded it greatly to include other regional organizations, in an effort to stir up support for a concept the organizers called “Archaeology 2.0”. Only time will tell if that concept catches on, but the long weekend was a mix of archaeology site visits, lectures, and discussions. I enjoyed it quite a bit and will write up one or two parts of it in more details for the Denver Chapter’s monthly newsletter.
A Sudden Change of Plans
Then on top of all the planned events, I received a job offer. Finally, after several weeks of looking for work in the unusual sub-field I specialize in, something in my wheelhouse appeared. They wanted me to start immediately. Should I cancel all of the above?
In the end, I worked out a deal to work part time from the road while doing all of the stuff above part time. More about that in a future post…
Here are a few photos from the trip that you might enjoy. In case you’re wondering, I’ve stripped the GPS metadata from all of them. Do you know why?
This is called Escalante Greathouse and is a short, easy walk up a hill near the Canyons of the Ancients Visitors Center. It overlooks the valley that now contains McPhee Reservoir, but which was a heavily populated area a thousand years ago. This is the only location I’ll be specific about here, since it’s a widely advertised location monitored closely by the BLM.
Here are the duckhead anthropomorphs. I think I found about six or seven of them on this trip. This style of petroglyph is only found in a roughly 50 mile radius. The Zunis have a story explaining the duck head people, but that’s not my story to tell.
This is an unexcavated greathouse. It doesn’t look like much but a pile of rocks, right? A very tall pile of rocks! It’s not much to look at, which keeps visitors away. But it’s special in that it is the westmost Chacoan outlier. I’m guessing it was 2 or 3 stories high in its prime.
This site takes a 4-hour drive (each way) on 4WD roads to get there. So yeah, I devoted more than a day of my trip just to see this. But it’s wonderful.
This archaeological site is on the side of the Abajo Mountains (sometimes called The Blues). I believe it’s the Ancestral Puebloan structure at the highest elevation, at least in this area.
Lastly, this is a Chacoan greathouse on private property. It’s called Mitchell Springs Ruin Group, and I’ve driven past the sign a dozen times since it’s only about a mile from the home of a friend. The owner of this land has been leading a pretty good quality excavation of the site for the past 30-ish years. I’ve never visited an archaeological excavation in progress on private land before. One rare aspect of this site is that it contains a tri-wall structure. Unfortunately, I had to leave the tour early for a CAS business meeting.
Leave me a comment and let me know which photos you liked the most, or what you want to learn more about.