Cedar Mesa

Um, one of them is, uh, um- ... place in the Daniel Boone f- forest, the, the Cascades of the Laurel, Laurel River.

Um, o- one of them is, um, Cedar Mesa in Utah, you know, the Bears Ears monument where that, um, supposedly, um, now the protections are being taken away from that fabulous piece of land, and who knows whether it'll even be there anymore.

Those I have to do entirely from memory, you know, 'cause I, I really couldn't take a trip out there this year.

And, uh-

I spent too much time on this.

Like areas all around Cedar Mesa, Wayne, like all around Bears Ears, the North Cascades, everywhere around there.

Like these are all areas that can be impacted by the ascension of this rule.

So also I just wanna mention, like this is not a foregone conclusion, it's a proposal.

You leave the highway and suddenly you're driving a dirt road into a landscape that feels almost completely untouched.

The formations surrounding you are made primarily from cedar mesa sandstone dating back roughly 250 million years.

Wind, water, and time slowly carved away the softer rock around them, leaving these enormous monuments standing alone across the desert floor.

There's Castle Butte, Rooster Butte, Setting Hen Butte, Pyramid Peak, and the Seven Sailors, a formation that, from the right angle, really does look like a row of figures standing silently in the desert.

At the western end, you can head toward the Moki Dugway.

And if you're afraid of heights, maybe don't look this one up until you're already committed.

It's a series of steep dirt switchbacks carved into the face of Cedar Mesa.

The road climbs from the desert floor toward the top of the mesa, twisting back and forth along the cliff.

Sleight was certain what it meant and held to it the rest of his life.

Everett left the burrows in David's Gulch, hiked east across Cedar Mesa, and drowned trying to cross the San Juan River.

In 2008, a Navajo man named Denny Belson went looking for a grave his sister had told him about.

Their grandfather, Anith Nez, had said that back in the 30s, he watched men kill a young white traveler, then carried the body up and buried it in a crevice on Comb Ridge near Bluff, Utah.