Going higher

The vastness of the landscape around us in Bluff feels something like bobbing around on the ocean, with islands of buttes and mountains dotted here & there.  At once, it is magnificent and at the same time, one searches out bite-sized bits to savor and digest.  

On one particular day, the señor got it into his head that we must visit a place called Muley Point, most assuredly not a bite-sized bit.  The view from up top was said to be spectacular, so we set off to discover it for ourselves.

Our route took us along the flank of Comb Ridge, the intimidating side that makes no bones about the impossibility of breaching its miles of magnificence.

The Moki Dugway . . .

My advice is "Don't do it" if precipitous driving conditions turn your insides to quivering jelly.  The aptly called scenic backway is every bit of that, yet it scared the bejabbers out of me.  An experience unto itself, the Moki Dugway is carved serpentine-like into the side of a steep mesa as a way to climb hundreds of feet from the valley floor to the top of Cedar Mesa.

A strategically-placed pullout is perfect for a look back at the portion already traversed and to gird one's loins for the final stretch. 

 

 

A short trail from there, equally precipitous, gave me time to wonder what in Hades I was doing up there, and to shoot a few photos that could have been taken from an airplane.

Keeping in mind that the road is unpaved, gravelly, hundreds of feet up, and with no guardrails, the journey was not one I care to repeat.  We were incredulous to spot a tank truck pulling a trailer grinding its way up the incline.  He blasted his horn every time he approached a blind curve to warn approaching vehicles to keep to the side. 

It was all worth it . . .

. . . and then some!  The views from atop that prominence were such that I could not cease from exclaiming in excitement and shooting one photo after another from every vantage point I could reach.  We looked out across what the San Juan River and its many tributaries had carved through layers of rock, and what an awesome sight it was!

 

Cedar Mesa . . .

Having availed ourselves of the precarious access and spent ample time at the precipice, we turned toward the interior of Cedar Mesa, where I satisfied my curiosity about the truck we had watched making its way up the Dugway.

We had seen it pull off the road toward a ranch corral, so assumed that it was delivering water for cattle.  There is no water on that part of the mesa.  What we found was that the driver had delivered his trailer filled with water and attached it to a float valve in a trough, and no doubt filled another tank with water from his truck.

We crawled under a wire gate to see whatever there was to see, and what we saw was a picturesque corral with nary a bovine in sight.

More wanders atop the mesa . . .

. . . led us to walk along the rim of Bullet Canyon, a far less dramatic sight but there is beauty everywhere around here. . .

. . . including at this Mule Canyon kiva and ruins. . .

. . . and later on a walk along Butler Wash, at least as far as the first two precarious crossings where branches had been placed by kindly earlier walkers.  The third not so much, so that was our turnaround.