A Panoramic View
of Salt Creek Canyon, Utah
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This panoramic view of upper Salt Creek Canyon was captured March 30, 2003 at around noon. The canyon is at the southern edge of Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah, near the town of Moab. From its source (shown here) to its mouth at the Colorado River (to the north), the canyon runs 20 miles point to point, not accounting for the meanders of its central and lower sections. | INTRODUCTION |
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The walls of the canyon are made of mixed layers of Cedar Mesa (white) and Cutler (red) Sandstones formed by sedimentary deposits about 250 million years ago. Faster weathering of the softer Cutler Sandstone layers has left bulbous "hoodoos" typical of the Park's Needles District. The surrounding mesas are made of a deep-red Organ Rock shale, a siltstone which creates some of the slickest mud on Earth. Cathedral Butte (to the Southeast in this view) is thought to be Wingate Sandstone, but reasonable limits on pack weight which prevented us from carrying a trained geologist also prevented positive identification. | GEOLOGY |
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The eight-mile upper section of the canyon includes several Anasazi ruins and pictographs, including the stunning "All American Man", a four-foot tall figure painted in red, white and blue on a cave wall about a mile south (i.e.: up the canyon) of Upper Jump. Dismissed by some archaeologists as a hoax, the pictograph's extremely unusual blue paint was recently dated by laboratory analysis to 1350 AD. | ARCHAEOLOGY |
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The weather in Salt Creek Canyon in the last week of March, 2003 was clear and cold. After a two-inch snowfall March 26, clear skies and a North wind kept daytime temperatures in the 50s and nights in the 20s. Weather records for nearby Moab show average highs and lows about 10 degrees warmer. Despite the cool temperatures, the sun was strong enough to burn us, and did. The floor of Salt Creek Canyon is at about 6,000 feet in elevation. The air is very dry: chap stick is a must. | WEATHER |
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Despite fresh snow, surface water was rarely seen in the canyon. We later heard the deep arroyos (washes) of the canyon were caused primarily by the thunderstorms of August while the snowmelt of spring was barely a factor. An apparently reliable source of water was found at a cascade near Kirk's Cabin, which is the only contemporary (that is, 1920s) structure for many miles. Salt Creek Campsites 1 and 2 are also nearby. | WATER |
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We were erroneously told by Park staff (granted, a volunteer) that the entirety of the Salt Creek Canyon trail, excepting the initial descent, was a Jeep road well-worn by decades of use. In fact, it appears that no four-wheeler but Kirk's old wagon (parked next to the cabin and remarkably well-preserved) has ever tread the canyon floor above Upper Jump. The trail switchbacks steeply from Cathedral Butte, criscrossing the widening wash, then winds through a plain of sagebrush before scattering in a sudden ebullience of marsh grass and reeds. Near the cabin, about three miles in, the canyon floor adopts the familiar pattern of a deep, weed-choked arroyo snaking through a flat sandy plain. | THE TRAIL |
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Unlike rangers at most other western parks, the Canyonlands' finest were thoroughly underwhelmed by the prospect of camp-raiding bears, making no mention of it in the briefing, on the permit or in Park signage. Indeed, the largest carnivore in evidence (excepting the human, I suppose) was the coyote, which left regular scat greetings on the trail. Mule deer were often seen bounding in packs of about a dozen along the thin ribbons of forest which line the tributary washes of side canyons. We occasionally caught a glimpse of a squirrel skittering across a dangerous pitch of sandstone above. A handful of unidentified songbird species provided a rousing dawn chorus, after which they gave way to crows. Many tracks were clearly preserved in the smooth, shady sand of small washes. | BIOLOGY |
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The predominant habitat of upper Salt Creek is the sagebrush plain, co-starring prickly pear and a few barrel cactus, and lots of what we presume to be blackbrush and Mormon tea (genus Ephedra), plus a garnish of yucca. In some areas, the brush was up to 8 feet tall. Inside the steeply walled arroyo, a pale, twiggy tree of some kind (willow? tamarisk?) densely covers the wettest areas, while gnarled, sometimes huge cottonwoods gather in the occasional grove. Along the small tributary washes that race down from the side canyons, juniper and pinon pine are joined by recumbent scrub oaks. The pine and juniper, along with mountain mahogany, can also be found in cracks and crevices high on the sandstone cliffs, often anchoring a lonely island of "cryptobiotic" soil on a windswept slope of stone. A small marshland near the source of the canyon featured tall reeds and very dense grasses which were soaked following the snowfall but dried out within three days. | ECOLOGY |
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-Bogart Salzberg and Ava Moskin | |