Love those serendipities

Even during the planning stages for this trip (or at least the bit of attention we put toward something akin to planning), serendipitous occurrences were showing up.  Another surfaced when we realized that some places of interest I had shared with the señor just happened to be at and near where we were overnighting on our way to a week at Vernal, Utah.  The chance of that seems to be somewhere between nil & none; nevertheless, shortly after I became aware of a couple of ghost towns in the Beehive State, we discovered that we had reservations at an RV park in one of them - Thompson Springs.

It wasn't much of a chore to cruise the one-and-a-half streets for photo ops.

Sold!  Some prime estate there.

A sign on the front door of the hotel says it lacks a traditional front desk and offers a phone number in its stead.

And then there was that one isolated ranchstead out by itself.  It appeared to have begun its existence as a small railroad-tie cabin with later extensive additions on both sides, and with an additional structure.

Sego, Book Cliffs . . .

The erstwhile town of Sego lies near the foot of the stupendous Book Cliffs, an imposing geologic feature that I first became enamored of when we were at Grand Junction and Fruita.  Sego, a coal mining ghost town (named for the lovely lily) is up the canyon a few miles from Thompson Springs.

 

A fairly good dirt road got us there.   Prior to the introduction of the diesel train engine and the retirement of steam engines, Sego was also accessed by a railroad spur that brought out coal mined from the large vein in the canyon wall.  Of course we climbed up to the top of the mine to see what we could see, wbich was basically more coal.

 

Our route took us through a narrow cut that once accommodated train tracks.

Most of the railroad bridges there have completely collapsed, but a few remain semi-intact.  Rivulets of water flow from each side canyon.

At the town site and scattered among sage thickets along the canyon floor, we found remnants of buildings, some crushed by boulders fallen from the cliffs above, some collapsed under their own weight and the ravages of time.

One impressive roofless edifice had been three stories high, built primarily of large cut sandstone blocks.

The Sego cemetery . . .

. . . is abandoned and forlorn, overgrown with weeds where it perches on a bench above the canyon bottom.

 

Fremont figures or extra-terrestrial beings . . .

A metal sculpture in Thompson Springs mimics some phantasmagorical prehistoric pictorgraphs  in the canyon, huge painted figures looming from three panels on the cliff faces. 

There's no way to know why this particular site was chosen or to understand the significance of the paintings, but those figures make me think of life from a non-Earth location.

I induced the señor to climb up there to give the figures some scale, but he's below and closer, so it doesn't show really well how large they are.  Our "discussion" about the matter puts them somewhere between 7 & 12 feet, depending on who you listen to.

In addition to the "aliens" and a possible spaceship, the rock art illustrates a beaver(?), and some more common things, such as a man on horseback and a man shooting a bighorn sheep with a bow & arrow.  Slightly higher up, there is a procession of older faded large all-red figures - a fascinating site indeed!

I couldn't resist this photo taken as I walked back to the truck: it appeared that our kayaks were floating out there on a sea of sage.

 

Birds . . .

Our delightful bird sighting surprise was seeing a number of chukars as we wandered through the canyons.  What striking birds they are and how nice for us to get such good looks!  We've only seen them once prior.

For our first day out - one that included more than nine hours of driving - we packed in a passel of doin's before we bid sayonara to the beautiful Book Cliffs for now.