The Xbox 360 took its inexorable toll this last winter, gradually turning me into a low-definition couch potato. FarSide2, BioShock, and Ghost Recon - all great games - kept me out of shape and hesitant to do anything about it. But - time to grab the Canon G9. It's hiking season!

Trip planning - down to a science.

Springtime in Denver seems just as hesitant, arriving as it does every year:  by fits and starts. My hiking pals have been closely following the temperatures in a specific area of desert, looking for the narrow window when it's neither too hot nor too cold.  Technology aids us here, in the form of NOAA's custom regional forecasts. In this case, for Salt Creek in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. The desired daytime temperatures? 70-80°F.

It's trivial to find descriptions of people's Salt Creek adventures on the internet.  From these, it was a simple matter of using Google Earth to set GPS waypoints for places like Big Ruin, pictographs like All American Man, The Four Faces, and Paper Doll; innumerable granaries and ruins, arches, and other geologic features.   One can't help but wonder how these ancient sites will withstand internet-driven popularity. 

Salt Creek is best done with a car shuttle on either end of the 26.5 mile route.  However, you'll want a high clearance vehicle (and probably 4WD) for the Peekaboo trailhead, so that you can negotiate a sandy wash and the foot or two of water that invariably chooses the road.

The general public - at large.

After a drizzly night on BLM land, we started our trek from the Cathedral Butte trailhead with an initial 1,150' drop into the Salt Creek basin, shedding layers as we descended.  Here we came across some hikers whose permit didn't quite seem to match up with their location. This was supposed to be an area with designated camping, but there were lots of places to hide, and this wasn't the only group we encountered that was making up their own rules; this was Hayduke country, after all. Even the gas pumps in Moab declare it.

At about 4 miles into the hike, we came to our first designated site, SC-1.  We set up camp and had lunch, then went on to find Big Ruin, where pottery shards abound, often sorted into collections by visitors. We didn't go up Big Pocket, a valley opposite the drainage with a few more more Anasazi structures, as well as Mastodon Arch.

Eyeballs calibrated for . . . ruin-hunting!

Once you settle down and started to pay attention to the surroundings, you realize that evidence of the valley's previous inhabitants are everywhere. There's a granary almost directly across from Kirk's Cabin, but the forbidding cliffs of the intervening wash make getting there a challenge.

All of the structures in Salt Creek have been well-picked over, because until about 1998, there was a road from Peekaboo to Angel Arch that delivered an onslaught of the curious. From the cowboys of last century to the 4WD travelers of this one, you would be hard-pressed to find a structure whose last visitor was the original inhabitant. Your best chance for discovering something new would be to pick an obscure, remote canyon to explore, but actually finding something should trouble your conscience. If you discovered a still-sealed granary or unbroken pot, could you leave it alone? If a pot is left in its original desert location, could you still appreciate it? You might end up hoping that you didn't find anything, because you'd be spared the moral anguish.

Into The Zone.

The next morning we visited some of the primary archaeological sites along the route to our next designated campsite, over seven miles away. My favorite was the All American Man pictograph, and I'd been wanting to see it ever since I'd heard about it. But it's not a particularly pleasing image: The head (and presumably intellect) is small, remarkably out of proportion to the large body. The artist of course had no idea that it could serve as a visual metaphor for the country that was to come some 500 years later.

We continued on to the Four Faces pictograph, and picked up a modest stream along Salt Creek for the next few miles, having a long lunch at the Upper Jump. Some of us hiked up to the Paper Doll pictograph, and then we were on to our next camp site at SC-4.

Early the following morning we visited Angel Arch, which turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. It's just huge; a jewel of Canyonlands that's seldom seen because it's ten miles from the nearest trailhead. Radeka has taken a nice image of it, although today the aspiring landscape photographer can't drive the road that is still visible in sections along the valley floor.

We endured a hot hike into our zone campsite, only to be greeted by another barrage of no-see-ums and the occasional voracious mosquito. I'm still recovering from their countless bites, but they are in the desert too, and have to drink something. Once settled in, we noticed an obscure granary well out of reach in a cliff on the slickrock above us. One of us had a small monocular, and peering in, noticed some pictographs and . . . someone's initials. The point is taken again: It's impossible to find something untouched in Salt Creek.

I'm now accepting donations for a Rubicon.

We exited at Peekaboo, and, after 4 days alone, my trusty Jeep had an unusually dead battery. Fortunately I had jumper cables, so we relaxed and drank our still-cool beer while we waited for someone to come along to give it a jolt. After about an hour, I drove the vehicle tentatively through pools which were now suspiciously deeper than when we had come up days earlier.

The trip was over. On the way back to Cathedral Butte for the car pick-up, we encountered a large Tag-a-long Expedition of khaki-clad shutterbugs (all guys, of course) with some Very Expensive Gear, photographing . . . a lizard. This group included famed Moab photographer Tom Till, evidently leading a Needles tour. On driving past, I learned that Tom was shooting that day with a Canon 1Ds Mark III. I'll take one of those, and a new Jeep Rubicon.

The following day I took my hiking partners to False Kiva - the first time for all of them. Things have changed since I last visited: Not only is there a distinct trail, but someone has taken the effort to put up cairns! Presumably this was done by the Park Service, who, while they would rather not tell you about this class II site, are nevertheless suggesting that - if you must go - not to tread on the cryptobiotic soil. Heck, False Kiva's so popular now, that it has it's own Wikipedia entry.

OK! Get out there!