
Round Trip Distance: 4.8 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Elevation: 5538 - 5813 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 4 hrs.
Trailhead: Browns Canyon
Fee: none
Attractions: cliff dwellings, pictographs










The Browns Canyon trail is located on the outskirts of Blanding, Utah. Beginning at the east end of the Browns Canyon Road the trail drops down into Recapture Canyon where in a short distance it passes over 20 separate cliff dwellings of various sizes. At least one of the sites has a few faint pictographs.
Drive south out of Blanding on US-191 for a mile and a half or so and turn left onto the Browns Canyon Road.
Continue straight when you reach the Perkins Road and follow the Browns Canyon Road all the way to its end. The last bit of the road is gravel but well suited for all types of vehicles. There is plenty of parking on a little hill just above where the trail begins which is on the left in this photo. Those with horse trailers will find enough room to turn around.
The first part of the trail shares its route with an ATV trail. Follow that for about a quarter mile from the trailhead to where it crosses a wash. Looking down the wash toward the canyon you will notice that it has a trail on its right side with some logs across it. A little past that you will see a brown mylar marker that says hiking and horseback riding only beyond this point.
Right at the head of this side canyon there are at least 4 ruins. If you are standing on the slickrock looking at this first ruin there is another ruin in an alcove beneath where you are standing.
Looking across the canyon and to the right you should be able to see this ruin and maybe at least one more. Once of the other ruins is in another alcove that has a lot of brush in front of it. There is a place where you can scramble down into the canyon across the way for a closer look. The bottom of the canyon at this point is probably too choked with brush to be able to easily hike down so you will probably want to return to the official trail to continue.
As you proceed down the trail into the canyon you will cross the wash a couple of times. Each of these crossings are a little marshy from natural springs.
There is one point that we marked on the GPX track where you will want to go to the left right before crossing back over to the south side of the wash. If you don't go to the left you will reach Recapture Canyon where there are a lot of ponds. By going to the left you can cross the wash of Recapture Canyon just above the ponds where it is normally dry.
Once you cross the wash in Recapture Canyon the trail climbs up onto a bench where it travels up the canyon on a very good trail passing each of the ruins in review. This is one of the first ruins.
All of the ruins on the east side of the canyon are up on inaccessible ledges but it is still pretty easy to get a good look at them. Notice the holes in the cliff on this ruin that once held one end of the logs that were used for roof supports.
This is the ruin that we labeled BC R7 on the map.
Another ruin on the east side of the canyon
And another.
And another.
These ruins are actually on the west side of the canyon so this photo was taken from a long ways away using a zoom lens. The higher ruin is still well intact. Notice the ruin peeking out between the trees on the left. There are actually quite a few ruins on the west side of the canyon besides these. Before the end of this post we will visit 3 of them.
Another east side ruin that is more whitish looking and still well intact.
This is one of the last ruins that we passed on the east side of the canyon. We continued hiking up the canyon on the good trail until we were across from the mouth of Lems Draw where you can see a house way up on top of the ridge.
On the way back to the trailhead the trail passes the point of a scenic cliff. On the right you will notice a few petroglyphs and a lot of gringo graffiti. We went to the right at this point to see 3 more ruins that are within an hundred yards or so and then came back this way to the trailhead.
There isn't a good trail on this side of the canyon so it takes a lot of scrambling around to work your way along the cliff. This is the first of the 3 ruins.
This is the second of the three and as you can see it has more than a handful of rooms. At one time it even had a row of rooms out in front of the cliff.
There are some white negative painted hands and a few faint red painted hands and this one anthropomorphic image here at the second site.
The third site has a massive wall that encloses a large alove. Notice the key shaped door that is after the style of those found at Mesa Verde and some other places.
We were close to yet another ruin where we turned around on the west side of the canyon but without a trail to follow the scrambling was getting pretty tough. Our plan is to come back and search out a different route and make a separate post for the west side of the canyon. As you hike on the east side of the canyon you will undoubtedly notice a lot of pottery shards. Some of them are even painted. Be sure to leave everything right where you find it. Not only is it illegal to remove anything but all those potsherds are some of what makes visiting these ruins so special. There's a lot to seen in Recapture Canyon. If you would like to see it for yourself then all you have to do is 'Take a hike'.