Oof what a rough night for me. The low was probably about 15F. My 20ish year old 0F bag is decidedly not a zero degree bag anymore, which was a tough lesson to learn. Despite a liner, thick thermal tops and bottoms, beanie, gloves, and strategically shoving my two down jackets I was still struggling to find enough warmth to sleep for more than a half hour at a time. So I woke up feeling fairly defeated and vulnerable to set out on a two day river trip that could be non-stop freezing. As we and our water slowly thawed in the sun we walked over to recheck out the Sand Island petroglyphs in daytime, a neat and strange assortment of many designs and styles through the ages right up to cowboy and modern graffiti carved into the desert varnish. It reminded me a bit of a modern graffiti wall with taggers competing for real estate and attention.
After breakfast in a warm car we drove the couple minutes to the San Juan River boat launch at the other end of the campground. My eyes deceived me at first as at first glance I thought I saw strange foam rafting down the river. After a few seconds of mental processing I realized it was ice! Lots of ice! Yikes! I think that was about all I had to see (as well as the short days and fact that we had not yet set a shuttle) to convince me that we should perhaps check out this section of the river in different circumstances. It could be OK but it could also be a miserable two days.
 |
| Too much ice! |
Rolling with the punches, indecisiveness, and improvising yet again, we decided to do a leisurely hike to check out some nearby Comb Ridge ruins, retreat to a motel in Monticello, then rally for a nice Needles hike the next day. We hiked into the cold monocline gully turned canyon to Monarch Cave Ruins, which I had not been to before. The tidily built ruins sit in a spacious alcove adjacent to a dryfalls with a plunge pool below. Nice enough ruins, apparently now with enough visitation that you could only see it beyond ropes with a quite wide berth, which certainly reduced appeal.
We returned back down the canyon and traversed slickrock in and out of several canyons headed for Eagle's Nest Ruin which I had been to before. On the way we found a random slope sprinkled with various types of ancestral Puebloan pottery sherds including coiled, corrugated coiled, and smoothed painted styles which was neat to stumble upon.
We walked up the sloping slickrock ramp to the remarkably difficult to access Eagle's Nest Ruin. With its difficult access it is easily the least visited ruin in the area and probably relatedly one of the best preserved. Years and years ago I tried to access the ruin with a friend but decided it was too sketchy. This time: yes every bit as sketchy as I remember it! The ruin sits in an alcove just below the top of a 300ft tall cliff requiring a 20 ft full exposure traverse on thin and worn moki holds. Once again I opted to photograph it from before the traverse.
After Eagle's Nest we hiked a short distance north to a view of one more ruin cleanly embedded into a canyon's alcove, and then walked back from the car. This time we opted to fight our way down the overgrown wash rather than in and out of the canyons cutting slickrock- it was about the same amount of effort probably. We had to navigate through some bizarre alluvial karst but eventually made it.
We opted to continue driving north along Comb Ridge to SH 95 instead of looping around to pavement which made a pleasantly scenic drive. We stopped to see a couple dinosaur tracks and then on to Monticello for warmth and pizza.
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