I spent a few months in the Bear’s Ears area mostly up what is now called Indian Creek. That’s N Sixshooter peak in the background above, it’s really a tower in canyon parlance. It was the early 80s, I and a bud named Scott rented a 4 bedroom house in Moab for $300. It was a time before mountain bikes. I think N Sixshooter is in more photos than the actual Bear’s Ears Butte.
The climbing is steep and I was just learning how to climb, here I got sick of the etrier and just started free climbing. I had all passive devices for pro, no spring loaded cams, all hexes and tube chocks. Photos of climbing by Tim D, not sure if he wants his name on things.
Rain isn’t common in the desert, I like how it brought out the red colors of the rock. I think the butte across Indian Creek is called Bridger Jack. All the rest of the photos are by Scott who I’m sure wishes to remain a private person.
We were doing a portable seismic survey. Walking and flying, nothing but footprints and skid prints. We are setting jumpers to go down the cliff here. Every time we came to a cliff we’d attach jumper cables to braided nylon rope and lower it down to the bottom. Some cliff bands were 300 feet of vertical.
If you look at the skids of the 500 you can see they have red things attached. Those are snow pads. This line went from the edge of Canyonlands all the way up to and over the La Salle Mountains at 12,000 feet. Part of our crew was already up in the mountains walking with snowshoes and above tree line. It was late November.
Above is the most important helicopter we used, an Aerospatiale Lama. The Lama has held the world’s altitude record for helicopters for 50 years or something. Big wide blades, big engine, airframe to let the wind blow through. They can lift a lot at altitude. Usually we worked above 10,000 feet.
One feature we worked through was called the fins. The rock was in narrow long sections, anywhere from 50 to a 100 feet on a side. We would simply set geophones at the bottom, jumper up to the top, stack phones there, and jumper down the other side.
This is how you get to the top of inaccessible fins or to the bottom of cliffs quickly. It’s called a hook ride, you simply stand on the hook and hold onto the long line. It’s all kinds of illegal, it was a long time ago.
Mostly days were spent walking and hanging out. Up top of the mesas it was flat, might as well be out on the prairie somewhere, gently rolling with cedar and sage, then abruptly another cliff. 45 miles in a straight line then move over ten miles and walk back 45 miles, a couple cross lines also. Across the Colorado river west of Moab out by the old uranium mine.
Later I became a better climber, and I and friends used to spend a few days at a time climbing the cracks at Indian Creek. By then Indian Creek had been discovered, but not overrun. Used to camp underneath some huge cottonwoods just across the road from Supercrack Buttress.
Years later in the late 90s when I got back to the states I drove there again, found the place with the cottonwoods in the middle of the night, had to open a barbed wire gate to drive in. No sign of track, like it hadn’t been used in years. Next morning a couple cowboys stopped by and told us it was private land. Some ranch lady had been letting climbers stay there for years.
The cliffs showed signs of traffic too. All the vegetation worn away at the base of the cliffs from people hanging out and walking back and forth. Every use wears and tears at the desert.
The canyons had quite a few signs of having been used by people a long time before. On top of one fin that was inaccessible from all sides was a round wall about 3 feet high. It was built of flat rocks maybe five ten or twelve inches to a side and thin, stacked up in a circle. Nothing inside, no sign of wood or beams or anything. It could well of been there a long long time and all wood had rotted, turned to dust, and blown away.