Round Trip Distance: 10+ miles
Difficulty: Strenuous
Elevation: 6430 - 7615 feet
Cellphone: 0 bars
Time: 6-8 hrs.
Trailhead: Upper Fable Valley
Fee: none
Attractions: cliff dwellings, rock art
Fable Valley is a remote canyon that is located in the Dark Canyon Wilderness Study Area west of Monticello and Blanding, Utah. Numerous cliff dwellings and rock art sites can be found along the canyons more than 10 mile length. In the big sagebrush above the gulley in the valley floor there is an occasional pueblo rubble pile. This post covers about 5 miles of the south end of the canyon which includes 2 miles of hiking to get to the drop in point.
By the time that you read this you should be able to enter 'Fable Valley South Trailhead' into your driving app for turn-by-turn directions through the maze of Forest Service Roads to the trailhead. If not you can use the GPS coordinates (37.8612, -109.97967) to accomplish the same thing. The south or upper trailhead is located along the Sweet Alice Springs Road a.k.a the Dark Canyon Plateau Road. There is another trailhead at the other end of Fable Valley in Beef Basin.
From the upper trailhead follow the 4WD road north for 2 miles and you will get to a dead end at the wilderness boundary where the trail begins dropping into Fable Valley. Most of the 4WD road is easy driving except near the start where there is a steep hill of loose talus that might require 4WL to crawl back up. Being alone we elected not to put our Tundra to the test.
The descent into Fable Valley is very steep but easily managed. As you work your way down the trail you can't help noticing the prominent knob on the right of this photo that you can see through the trees.
Ruins can be spotted at the base of the knob on both the north and west sides. There is no obvious trail leading to them so we took a few distant photos and passed them by. As you continue down the trail you will probably notice more minor ruins and caves in the steep cliffs on the left side of the canyon.
After reaching the floor of the valley you have to pick from the many routes through the big sagebrush to find a place to cross the deep gulley that runs the length of Fable Valley. For reference Aesops Arch is directly ahead in this photo in the cliff on the opposite side of the gulley. From here what you see is the abutment so it doesn't look like an arch until you view it from the left or right.
The next ruins are on the west side of the cliff of a side canyon. They are easy to spot on the hike out but you might not notice them on the ingress if you don't know where to look. We set a waypoint for them in the downloadable GPX file attached to this post.
We've heard several names given for the largest ruin which is in a high alcove of the south facing cliffs. Two of them are 'The Citadel' and 'The Fortress'. The Fable Valley Palace wouldn't be too bad either. To get up there you have to hike up the side canyon on the right and scramble up from that point. There is a small ruin in the alcove of the side canyon beneath a spillover.
To the left of the ruin in the large alcove and a little lower down the cliff is another well intact ruin that looks like it was built over the entrance of a shallow cave or deep overhang.
A panel of pictographs can be found even lower down on the same point as the last ruin. They are lower down from the ruin but they are still high up on the cliff below a shallow overhang.
About another mile down the canyon in a short side canyon there is a small ruin with a lot of pictographs above it. You will need to click on the photo to view the hi-res copy to see them well but on the right are some negative handprints that are pretty easy to make out. On the cliff far to the left of this ruin are some remnant walls of another ruin.
More pictographs can be found at the point of this side canyon in the main drainage. First find a wire corral below the southeast side of the point and then begin examining the cliff up above.
On one face of the cliff is this panel of white images.
On another face is this barred red and white saw tooth image.
Adjacent to that panel there is a fainter red saw tooth image trailing off on the left.
There are a lot of minor ruins that are scattered all over the place that we didn't mark on the map because we didn't get close enough to them to register a waypoint on our GPS. This blackened cave is on the west cliff as you descend into Fable Valley across from where we marked the 1st ruin. If you look close you can see a wall remnant on the right about 10 feet below the cave. There are a couple more caves with wall remnants in the same area.
