Bullet Canyon is one of the tributaries of Grand Gulch I did not have time to explore on a previous San Juan River packraft and Grand Gulch backpack trip Jeff and I did a few years ago. Most of the excellent ruins in the canyon are within the bottom 2.5 miles of the confluence but we just did not have the time to fit in such a big detour. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to day hike down to check out the ruins while Heather and the kids hiked the more accessible Moonhouse Ruins nearby. They dropped me off at the trailhead at 10am and set a 2:30pm pickup time. A short rim walk led to a break in the cliff down into the shallow canyon. There was plenty of water in pools and puddles on the canyon floor, always in ice form. In contrast to previous days, cloud cover was complete with a chance on rain I was surprised at the excellent quality of the unmaintained trail and soon realized that travel would be much better than typical sections in nearby Grand Gulch. After about a mile and a half, a series of bedrock dryfalls caused the canyon to rapidly deepen.
I continued at a good pace following the many bench trails that helped smooth out the sinuosity of the streambed. Most of the canyon stayed fairly narrow but at one point the canyon opened up into a meadowy park. It was easy to imagine this being an ancestral hangout spot, whether hunting elk or farming corn.
After a long straightaway, a right bend in the canyon turned me to stare towards a large stately alcove, the most obvious place for a settlement in the entire canyon up to this point and the location of Perfect Kiva. I clambered up the slickrock to gain the ledge and took my time exploring the many ruins, and more subtle features like multi-colored pictographs, metate grinding rocks, scratching rocks, pottery shards, and mini corn cobs. There was so much to see but I kept getting drawn back to the well preserved home with the T-shaped doorway and the ominous ladder into the darkness of the Perfect Kiva. I stepped down the modern facsimile of an ancient ladder to peer inside without disturbing the ground inside. The view up was nearly as dramatic as the view downward. This would have been a pretty neat place to live overall and must have been the envy of many others in the region.
After exploring the entirety of the alcove and a quick snack, I took a guess that I could walk out the ledge around the corner to Jailhouse Ruin, which proved true. This ruin was quite the contrast to the stately and well organized alcove of Perfect Kiva. Here very shallow alcoves were walled over to create a multi-level ruin. The upper level seems inaccessible in its current form but gives the place a fortress-like feel with what looks to be a defensive wall and three prominent pictographs seeming to ward off intruders. The low level consists of some complex granaries built into an alcove and the remains of what might have been a house in the front. The stick-and-adobe work here is particularly well preserved. The ruin gets its name from a small window crossed with sticks; since this is in the wall of a granary I think it is probably likely that this window was unintentional and is instead a small collapse of the wall. After some more pictures it was time to head back up the canyon.
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| Jailhouse Ruin at center right |
The sky continued to darken and cold rain drops began to be more prevalent. The temperature never got above 40F all day and despite my fast pace I maintained a thermal top throughout. I passed a couple groups on the way back up and generally made good time knowing where all the best trails were this time. Most of the way back up the canyon I took a chance at a place I thought I might be able to climb out to see the cliff edge lookout tower ruin. I surmounted a couple very frictiony and exposed slickrock slab moves and then had one last cliff band to get through to gain the rim. After a bit of a traverse I spotted a sideway sloping ramp of rock to a large juniper halfway up the cliff. I managed to climb the juniper to gain the ridge, a fun little route. Walking the rim I eventually came to the lookout tower ruin. Surprisingly it was not actually on the edge of the cliff but completely inaccessible on a vertical walled boulder that detached. A curious dry-stacked ruin, it was hard to imagine its purpose. I arrived right on schedule back at the trailhead, satisfied at seeing a couple more classic Cedar Mesa ruins. There really is so much to explore in this region with fairly remarkable archaeological preservation.
After we had the simple but long matter of driving back over the next day and a half. The scenery had a moody tinge to it, particularly Monument Valley, with the dark skies covering the land. All in all it was a great if short little getaway.
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