Yellow House ruins

Stephen Fischer Photography

These ruins are found down Sheiks Canyon in the Grand Gulch area on Cedar Mesa (south of Natural Bridges national park). They are noteworthy for the stronger tones of yellow in the sandstone canyon wall.  Also of interest is one of the kivas with its original wood roof and willow based twine still holding it together (see image 3).  Another ruins further down the canyon has an unusual honeycomb formation in the the surrounding sandstone overhang (shown in image 4 below).  Although I did not get to it, If you have more time, another 3 miles down Sheiks canyon you can find the Green springs ruin.

While near the trailhead for Sheiks, we also explored the possibility of a road that is shown on the topo maps and something we heard about from someone else that would provide a short cut for accessing Bullet canyon further along and close to the Perfect Kiva and Jailhouse ruin. But trail looks only practical by foot about 3 miles in length, with the only 4WD possibility via up a wash. But this wash was strewn with many fairly large boulders and would have been slow going if possible at all.