Anasazi ruins

I spent a week of May, 2011 in the Cedar Mesa area of southern Utah to photograph Anasazi indian ruins with two fellow photographer friends, Don Van Dyke and John Murray. Below is a representative image for each of the sites we visited including one extra one that we had visited last year (Fallen Roof ruin).  You can click on each icon to see a short summary and description for that location with some additional, more detailed images.  After getting a taste for the Southwest Pueblo Indian culture last year during a visit to the Four Corners area including Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, we planned this trip to get a more immersive experience of more of the ruin sites and to capture some high quality photographs.  For more background, in addition to some contacts I made through Flickr like Eddie TK and John Mumaw (Mr. Jalapeno), I found the books "In search of the old ones" by David Roberts and "Canyon hiking guide to the Colorado Plateau" by Michael Kelsey to be highly useful.

Even after this trip, I feel to have just scratched the surface on the number of Anasazi ruins to be explored and number of photographic possibilities to be imaged.  This trip was made from a tourist point of view given access to all of these ruins can be done as day hikes and each location has been previously seen by thousands of people before.  With enough time in the southwest with some longer duration hikes to get more off the beaten path, one could find hundreds if not thousands more of these ruins, petroglyphs, and other signs of this previous yet still relatively poorly understood culture.  As you hike through the various canyons, I find myself now looking up on the southern facing walls for signs of their previous existence, wondering what may be over that ledge just out of eye shot.  Given the vastness and rugged nature of this terrain, dead-end canyons, steep cliffs of which many are very difficult to access without climbing gear, there are probably still many locations yet to be discovered or documented, perhaps only known to a few.