Today we are down in Dark Canyon Wilderness.
Which is the only wilderness area on the Manti-La Sal National Forest.
It was designated in 1984 by the Utah Wilderness Act.
And we are specifically in Horse Pasture Canyon which is towards the head of Dark Canyon.
Dark Canyon is a large canyon system, it was actually the first canyon system
that was designated wilderness on the Colorado Plateau.
This is a very unique wilderness area.
It basically starts in higher elevations up on Elk Ridge.
So you have really unique vegetation types here ranging from aspen and douglas fir
coming down to ponderosas and eventually into more arid pinyon, juniper, and sagebrush vegetation.
So it is a really unique wilderness in that it protects a lot of different ecosystem types.
Dark Canyon itself, we have a trail system in here that we manage and we maintain.
It's wilderness, so it is still fairly primitive.
But there is great opportunities for backpacking here.
There is a fourty mile loop that comes down Peavine Canyon and up Dark Canyon.
And there's numerous places for day hikes like where we are now
is a great place to come in and do a day hike or shorter backpack trip.
Horse packing is also something that is available here,
popular with people to bring horses or mules in and bring all their equipment in.
Those are the main ways to get into the wilderness.
The wilderness is essentially managed to maintain its naturalness
and opportunities for primitive recreation and also for solitude, opportunities
for solitude.
And solitude is one of the big qualities we have here in Dark Canyon.
It is fairly hard to get to, the logistics are kind of hard,
but if you make the effort to get out here, you are pretty much going
to experience some pretty wild country.
One of my favorite parts about Dark Canyon is spending the night down here.
the skies just turn pitch black, you get this amazing view of the stars
with very little light pollution, enough to see the milky way as well,
stretching out over the rim of the canyon.
The wilderness itself is basically a horseshoe shaped canyon system.
Which is wooden shoe on one side and Dark Canyon that comes down the other.
The canyons cut through cedar mesa sandstone, so you've got these big, huge walls, towers,
a lot of arches as you go up and down the canyon.
So the natural setting is just really spectacular.
And on top of that, the other factor that makes Dark Canyon
such a unique wilderness, is we have a really interesting and intact
cultural overlay on the canyon here.
So people have been living in this canyon for thousands of years,
starting with Paleo indians and then moving into a lot of the big archeology
that you see here is from the ancestral puebloans that a lot of people know as anasazi.
And there's a lot of those types of ruins in the canyon that kind of show the long habitation
from people living here.
At some point in history, this behind us was probably a giant corn field.
There's ruins all over the canyon itself where they would store the corn,
and that's a really unique feature of the wilderness and very sensitive feature as well.
It's something we try to protect and manage so that other folks can see it in pristine
conditions.
There's also a lot of historical resources that are still here.
Just down below us here in the canyon you have what is known as Scorup Cabin.
That is a historic cabin used by the Scorup cattle company during the turn of the century.
Really intact, wood stove, a lot of different things that you can see in there
that showed the historic anglo settlement of the canyon as well.
So like I mentioned, here in the wilderness, we manage it for naturalness,
so we really want people to use leave no trace techniques when they come down here.
Fires are allowed, permits are not required right now just because we have a low amount
of use.
But when you do come down, we ask that people use an existing campsite
with an existing fire rings and not build new ones.
We ask that people don't build camp furniture down here, whether that's chairs or tables
out of rocks and stuff.
And really leave the area as natural as possible.
The other big potential impact that recreation use can have,
is on these archeological sites, and when you visit those,
you want to make sure that you do it in a very sensitive way.
Before you approach the site, you want to look at it and see where the most
hardened area is, if there's an existing trail, you want to
use that.
You do not want to climb on walls, put any weight on the walls,
climb through doors, or anything like that.
Because the accumulated amount of people that do that,
is eventually going to knock that ruin down.
Some of our structures here still actually have roofs intact.
You definitely don't want to be standing on a roof.
These are thousand year old structures and very sensitive to that type of impact
so if you do visit these sites, be incredibly careful when you visit them.
There's also pottery shards and artifacts that are protected under the antiquities act.
As well as the ruins, so if you see those things,
leave them in place, don't pile them into a little pile and make an outdoor museum,
but leave them where they are.
The context of those artifacts is what is important to the archeologists
to determine how people lived here and the timeframes they lived
and the pathways that they made a living down here.
So we just ask that people, it's ok to visit them,
it's an amazing place to visit these sites, but really be careful when you do it,
leave the artifacts there, and don't put any weight on the walls or climb
through the doors.
And here in Dark Canyon we have a very unique wilderness.
It's a place that people don't expect when they come here.
With cedar mesa sandstone walls and towers, with the really unique cultural overlay
the opportunity to visit places where people lived a thousand years ago
and still see exactly how they lived and where they lived, it's incredibly unique.
But the future of this place and maintaining the naturalness of it
and really the cultural importance of it is really up to visitors.
And when you come here, we ask that people come and enjoy their public lands and enjoy
this wild landscape but do it in a sensitive way and leave no
trace.
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