The Bears Ears: A Human History of America's Most Endangered Wilderness

by David Roberts

Cave 7 in Whiskers Draw, twenty-five miles northeast of Grand Gulch,

Escalante Desert, hiking down the canyons tributary to the Escalante River or climbing up onto the otherworldly mesa of Fifty-Mile Mountain. To me, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the Southwest.

Jacobs Chair, the striking butte that rises 1,700 feet from its base between Long and Gravel Canyons, is named after Adams.

A cabin he built in the 1930s in Rig Canyon, a tributary of Dark, was later dismantled, moved piece-by-piece, and reassembled a few miles up Horse Pasture Canyon, another Dark Canyon branch. Still in a state of exquisite preservation, it serves today as an emergency shelter but also as a kind of museum of the cowboy life.

Dugout Ranch, in a blissful setting at the junction of Cottonwood and Indian Creeks, would become a legendary symbol of the supposedly idyllic homesteading life.

where Sheiks Canyon comes in from the left. Our National Geographic

map of Grand Gulch Plateau indicated Green Mask Spring only two-tenths of a mile up Sheiks. I also studied the USGS quadrangle. We didn’t need a spring; we had plenty of good water; so we skipped the side canyon. A couple of years later, when I hiked down Sheiks, I realized that Sharon and I had missed one of the two most stunning and extensive collections of rock art on all of Cedar Mesa, which a fifteen-minute llama-less detour would have brought us to. (Why didn’t the name “Green Mask” tip us off?

“Bears

Ears Controversy: Some Monumental

Iss...

Bears Ears: the places where I planned to go, and now never will. Bodie Canyon. The full west fork of Salt Creek. The summit of Bridger Jack Mesa. Youngs Canyon, and lower Dark. Mancos Mesa. Gravel, Hideout, and K and L Canyons. Harts Draw. Lockhart