Round Trip Distance: 1.8 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Elevation: 6294 - 6352 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 3 hrs.
Trailhead: 37.47711, -109.86970
Fee: $5/person/day or $10/week
Attractions: cliff dwellings
Ruins can be found all along the South Fork of Owl Creek in the Cedar Mesa Area of Bears Ears National Monument west of Blanding, Utah. This post covers the first 4 or 5 ruins that are on the east upper end of the South Fork.
For turn-by-turn direction to the turnoff enter 37.49577, -109.89571 into your driving app. From the Kane Gulch Ranger Station you will be directed south on UT-261 for 2 miles. At that point turn left onto the unmarked Emigrant Trail. (Google Maps is unaware of the Emigrant Trail Road so it can't provide suitable directions all the way to the trailhead.) From here you will probably want to be in a 4WD vehicle with at least medium ground clearance for the next 2.1 miles to the unmarked trailhead. A good place to park once you get there, is to pull off of the road onto the slickrock.
After parking find your way to the rim of the canyon. There are no official trails in the area but there are some suitable game trails and other social routes.
All the ruins that we know about are on the east side of the canyon so the best route to follow is to hike around the end of the canyon on the slickrock and then head down the east, or northeast, rim.
As you hike around the end of the canyon there is a semi-circular ruin that you can easily spot beneath an overhang that we marked on the map as a possible kiva.
The next trick is to find a suitable place to drop over the rim to get into the canyon. We marked one of these drop ins on the map but there are others depending upon your scrambling abilities.
From where we chose to drop over the rim we began hiking back up the canyon just below the highest cliff looking for ruins. We marked several of these on the map but you might notice others as well.
A few of the ruins are nothing more than rubble piles but there are several, like this one, that have held together a little better.
This ruin takes advantage of a large boulder for most of one of its outer walls. The boulder added a lot of stability to the ruin.
What we marked as ruin 3 on the map is a ruin that can be seen easily from the trailhead side of the canyon.
