A Bridge Too Far...

Far from the beaten path, in a remote chasm in SE Utah, Natural Bridges National Monument is an oft-overlooked treasure worth exploring.

View our video clip on hiking Natural Bridges National Monument.

It's just a little place, really. A rugged loop of canyon tucked away in a small area between the town of Blanding and Hite Marina on Lake Powell. But in terms of beauty and natural wonders per square foot, few places in the Southwest can compare with Natural Bridges National Monument.

The monument boasts three impressive natural bridges carved from ancient Cedar Mesa sandstone. They are called Sipapu, Kachina and Owachomo. Nowhere else in the world have bridges on such a grand scale formed so closely to each other.

But bridges are only one of the attractions here. There is also a concentration of ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) ruins and artifacts. The most famous is called the Horsecollar Ruin, because the doorway is arched in a fashion that resembles the collar used to harness draft horses.

Making a Monument
Teddy Roosevelt made Natural Bridges a National Monument in 1908 by invoking the Antiquities Act of 1906, to "reserve these extraordinary examples of stream erosion with as much land as necessary for the proper protection thereof..."

The monument includes a pinyon-juniper-covered mesa bisected by White Canyon and her upper tributaries, Deer, Tuwa and Armstrong canyons. Because of the monument's beauty, accessibility and facilities, Natural Bridges is one of Utah's most attractive family hiking and camping destinations. The setting is wild and woolly, but the Park Service has done a great job of providing easily negotiable trails to the bridges and interpretive displays and placards that explain the area's rich natural history as it unfolds to the visitor.

Sipapu (SEE-pah-poo) means "place of emergence," an opening between worlds through which the Hopi believe their ancestors entered the present terrene sphere. Sipapu is the largest and the most spectacular of the monument's bridges. It's considered middle-aged, older than Kachina but younger than Owachomo. Kachina (ka-CHEE-na) is named for the Hopi katsina spirits that frequently displayed lightning snake symbols on their bodies. Similar snake patterns carved by prehistoric people can be found a hundred feet south of Kachina Bridge on the west side of the canyon. Owachomo (o-WAH-cho-mo) means "Flatrock mound" and was named for an outcrop on its east side.

Dark-Sky Park
Natural Bridges has one of the darkest night skies in the country. In fact, the beauty of the night sky here led the International Dark-Sky Association to designate Natural Bridges as the world's first International Dark Sky Park.

Horsecollar Ruin
The Horsecollar site was first described by Anglo-Americans in the late 1880's. In 1907, an archeological expedition documented the site and later recommended the establishment of Natural Bridges National Monument (which was founded the next year). Sometime thereafter, Horsecollar Ruin seems to have been forgotten. One cold November day in 1936, it was rediscovered by Zeke Johnson, the first curator of the Monument. He wrote:

I am very much thrilled over a discovery I made the other day. I was working about half way between Sipapu and Kachina Bridges and at lunch time I was in the narrow canyon where the sun does not shine very much at that time of year, but I could see that about thirty feet above me the sun was shining warm and bright on the cliff. I crawled up a broken ledge thinking that it would be nice to eat my lunch there when to my surprise I saw a ledge full of houses, within 80 yards of the trail over which I have walked for more than twenty years.

There is one large kiva with the roof almost complete and a fine ladder standing in the hatchway with the small willows still holding the rungs in place. I could not tell how many rungs are on the ladder because of the debris which the pack rats have piled up around its base; only three and a half feet show between the top of the pile and the hatch. Beside the kiva are two well-preserved stone and adobe houses with no roofs but walls which are in a fine state of preservation. A small barrel shaped structure abuts against one of the houses. Six or eight rooms with walls of fine masonry but partly torn down are also on the ledge. There is a lot of broken pottery and flaked stone lying about. I picked up six arrow points and several broken ones.

You know, I felt like a foolish kid to have passed so near these ruins for so many years and not know of their presence, but someone had found them before I did many years ago; a few pits have been dug in the ruins but the kiva has not been touched.

You can see many of the treasures of this monument from roadside viewpoints. However, to really experience the wonders here we encourage visitors to get out and hike - hike with eyes wide open.

- Dave Webb

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