Round Trip Distance: 0.2 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 6265 - 6280 feet
Cellphone: 0 bars
Time: 30 mins.
Trailhead: Ruin 6
Fee: none
Attractions: Ancestral puebloan ruins
Ruin 6 and Ruin 8 are located in the Ruin Park area of Beef Basin northwest of Monticello, Utah. Both ruins are within a couple hundred feet of each other just over 1 mile past the more well known Farmhouse Ruins. Ruin 6 is a multi room pueblo type structure and appears to be of more recent construction than the nearby Ruin 8 which has very little of its original walls remaining.
To get there first find your way to the Butte Ruins trailhead. From there continue straight on the road for another half mile.
We chose to park on the hill above a broad wash and hike the last quarter mile or so to the ruins. The road wasn't really much worse than other rough spots that we had encountered but there looked to be an alcove or cave not far off that might be worth seeing.
The road comes within a hundred feet or so of the ruins which sit on a small bench on the shoulder of a hill.
Short standing walls form the outline of maybe at least a half dozen different rooms of similar sizes.
Looking to the east the Butte Ruins site can be seeing a short distance away. Whether the 2 sites were contemporary of each other an archeologists would have to determine. Looking at this wall it seems surprising what a poor job the builders did of interweaving the stones but rather stacked many of them in columnar fashion. It must be the flat surfaces between them that has allowed them to remain standing all these years. Be careful not to touch or lean on the walls or disturb them in any way. If the ruins would have been fenced to keep the cows away they may have endured in even better condition.
There are some corners that were perfectly tied together. All the rocks appear to have been dry stacked as no mortar can be seen between any of the rocks. It brings to mind some older wood frame houses that lacked plaster or insulation and had places where daylight could penetrate the walls. A crude double entendre of the time was 'catching a cold from sleeping too close to the crack'.
Another more minor ruin can be found right at 180 feet to the southeast.
There are only small sections of walls remaining at this site that we arbitrarily labeled as Ruin 8. Looking around Ruin 8 there doesn't really appear to be enough rubble remaining to actually reconstruct the apparent rooms. For that reason we wondered whether most of the stones were relocated to build the larger Ruin 6.
More interesting than the few sections of walls at Ruin 8 is what may have been a kiva as it appears to have been circular in shape and dug at least partially below ground level. It doesn't have the outline of most pithouses that we have seen but that's not to say it wasn't a pithouse rather than a kiva.
Just up the sloping landscape from that is another circular looking ruin.
There are interesting aspects of both Ruin 6 and Ruin 8 that in our opinion make them worth visiting. Especially to gain a broader view of how the area was once inhabited and how the signs left from that period of time look at present. If you would like to see it for yourself then all you have to do is 'Take a hike'.