The last time I drove to Utah had been in the heart of winter, when I went on a winter camping trip to the San Rafael Swell with a group of old friends. In December, white snow blanketed the ground to every horizon, only broken by the unending line of pavement that ran west, ever westward. Now, in the middle of May, that same route looked like it belonged on a different planet. The desert was in flower. The ground was painted in orange globemallows and red Castilleja, all jostling for position to soak up water and sunlight in the short window until it grew too hot. In a few weeks, the ground would be parched again, the plants dormant, the seeds buried in the soil and waiting patiently for the next spring when they could sprout forth once again.
This time, I stopped in Green River, Utah, and found a campsite in a campground next to the Colorado River. The river was fat with snowmelt and sediment and lapped eagerly at the lowest campsites. It had already claimed one picnic table and was making a valiant attempt at a cooler that someone had left at the river’s edge. I chose a spot that lay at higher elevation in accordance with my Dutch instincts to avoid flood-prone areas.
There was a sign on the dumpsters to warn campers that “desert bears are real” and to store their food in a hard-sided vehicle. It was a little hard to take the sign seriously, as the dumpster was covered by a plastic sheet that an anemic weasel could have lifted without issue. I hope people still took care to stow their food and garbage where claws and sniffling snouts couldn’t reach them. If I were a bear, I’d also prefer to harass campers for food rather than trying to eke calories out of the desert.
The river still hadn’t swept me away by the time I woke up the following morning and I drove out of the campsite, watching the dumpsters warily for desert bears out for an easy snack. I parked along a nondescript section of road and hiked a mile through the dark to my transect over sandy bluffs and ridges. Water had pooled at the bottom of the ridges and formed little ponds dominated by cattails and Russian olives. I followed the valleys until I got close to my transect and then hiked up to the top of a ridge for my first point, my boots sinking into the sand. In the beam of my headlamp the desert plants looked like they came from an alien planet. Desert trumpets (Eriogonum inflatum) with its bulbous stems and prince’s plume (Stanleya pinnata), yellow and splendid and as tall as my hips, grew copiously despite the barren ground.
Once it got light enough to start, I recorded rock wrens and lark sparrows. In the damp pockets between ridges, lazuli buntings sang. Lazuli buntings are one of my special favorite birds. To be fair, I say that about a lot of species. That’s because they’re all my special favorites (except for Claudia, that herring gull that stole my chips in Aberdeen. I hope she flies into a window).
When I first started birding, lazuli buntings were one of the first species I learned to spot on the Montana hillsides. I’ve had a soft spot for them ever since, with their electric blue backs and neat orange bibs. That said, I’ve always struggled to memorize their song. A lot of birds have phrases that are recognizable across the species (like red-winged blackbirds). Lazuli buntings are magpies of the bird world and pick and choose phrases they like from other lazuli buntings. Young males pick up phrases from adult males and then remix them, resulting in all the lazuli buntings in one neighborhood sounding different from those in the next. Rather than memorizing specific phrases, it’s better to learn the sound quality of the jumbled metallic notes. There are birds that skulk, and creep, and lurk, but the lazuli bunting is an unapologetic extrovert. Between its bright plumage and its habit of sitting at the tops of trees and shrubs as it sings, it’s easy to pick them out visually. The females are more subtle in color and prefer to watch the show from behind some cover.
The rest of the barren landscape was quiet, with little vegetation to attract birds. Apart from one show-boating lark sparrow that I heard from four different points there were very few birds. Occasionally, Canada geese flew overhead on their way to or from the Green River a mile away. The soil was cracked and loose, giving way and crumbling underneath my feet. The only consistent birds were the rock wrens, absolutely loving the barren landscape and giving their car-alarm calls from every damn rock.
Four of my points were on the far side of a barbed wire fence. It was too high for me to step over without severe risk of trouser (and possibly crotch) damage and I settled for crawling underneath while cursing the farmer for maintaining their fences so well. A group of mule deer watched me scuttle around on my belly like a lizard and they jumped over the fence with such ease that it was hard not to take it personally. The deer weren’t the only wildlife: while the landscape was barren and quiet from a birding perspective, the lizards came out to bask as the ground warmed up. A coyote kept a wary eye on me and trotted off when I turned in its direction. A red fox sat on its haunches and sniggered at me as I tried and failed to find a graceful way to descend a butte and slid down on my bum instead.
After the survey I poured the sand out of my boots and had a late breakfast while I pored over the map and planned my route to the next survey. The route via the highway was far faster but I decided to take a detour through Ninemile Canyon instead to see the petroglyphs.
Ninemile Canyon is an incredible archeological site with Fremont and Ute petroglyphs and pictographs lining mile after mile of canyon wall. It’s a patchwork of private and public land but there are pullouts to park. Some of the images are easy to spot from the road and others require a short walk and a keen eye. Over time, a dark patina of iron and manganese oxides forms on sheltered rock walls in dry climates, called desert varnish. The petroglyphs were formed by artists carefully pecking images into the desert varnish to reveal lighter rock underneath. Would I too accumulate a desert varnish on my skin as I spent more and more time in this landscape of red soil and junipers? With only a quick cat wash to keep myself clean most nights, I was rapidly turning into a very grubby goblin indeed, but that was standard grime rather than a geologic process.
Most of the images were easy to recognize—bighorn sheep, with hunters pursuing them with bow and arrows or driving them towards nets; hooved animals like bison and elk; human figures with their hands joined together; bear tracks and owls with their wings spread wide. Other images were more difficult to interpret. Figures with ornate heads, where I couldn’t tell if they were mythical beings, masks, or head pieces. Even if some of the images puzzled me, the stories the petroglyphs told were still the same stories that humans have told other humans for thousands of years. Stories of the hunt, stories of community, stories to say “I was once here, and I knew this land”.
These are only the images that have endured the relentless march of time. There were many more that have since eroded away by wind and water or been vandalized beyond recognition. It’s easy to pick out the ones that people in contemporary times have made in imitation. Sometimes they make it very easy, by carving their name and the date. I genuinely thought that in 2023, we as a species would have realized that it’s poor etiquette to vandalize historic sites by scrawling our names over the top of them. Judging by the dates on some of the scratches, I was wrong.
Even though there are petroglyphs in Ninemile Canyon that have been there for over a millennium, they are incredibly sensitive. The oils in our hands can make them degrade, and even the moisture from our breath is enough to make them weather away. The best way to look at them is from afar. A pair of binoculars is excellent for picking out petroglyphs on far-away outcrops. More importantly, it lets you look for birds at the same time. True to form, the canyon was littered with rock wrens calling from every boulder and outcrop. Northern mockingbirds did covers of vireos and kingbirds in the pinyon juniper forest along the canyon bottom.
You could spend years roaming this canyon, finding more images hidden on sheltered rocks and boulders. I only had a couple of hours and reluctantly tore myself away from the stories written on the rock when dark thunderclouds covered the sky and fat raindrops began to fall. By all accounts, the road out of the canyon turned into a slip and slide when wet and I wanted to get back to a paved road before that happened. I still needed to get to my next survey site, find a camping spot, and get ready for bed before it got too late. Tomorrow would be another early day.