Tips for visiting with respect
The high mesas and canyon shelters of southeastern Utah hold places that have endured for a thousand years. Whether they endure another century is almost entirely a matter of how the next decade of visitors behave.
These landscapes are still meaningful to the communities whose ancestors built them — Hopi, Zuni, Ute, Navajo, and the broader Pueblo world — and remain in active relationship with them today. If you haven’t read it, the broader orientation for first-time visitors is a useful companion to what’s below. The practical rules below proceed from that frame.
Stay on durable surfaces
The crust on much of the desert floor is a living layer — a fragile mat of cyanobacteria, lichens, and mosses that holds the soil together and helps plants establish. A footprint in cryptobiotic crust can be visible for decades. Walk on slickrock, in dry washes, or on existing paths. If you must cross open ground, look for sand or gravel.
Look, don’t touch
Rock art, masonry walls, and structures should be observed at a distance. The oils on human skin damage paint and pigment. Leaning against a wall a thousand years old can be the load that fails it. Move slowly and keep your hands at your sides.
Leave artifacts exactly where you find them
A sherd of pottery, a worked flake, a piece of cordage — these objects have meaning in their place. Picking them up and moving them, even just to a “better” spot for someone else to see, destroys information. Photograph them where they lie and leave them there. Removing them is a federal crime under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act.
Don’t build, rearrange, or “improve”
This includes cairns, stacked-rock signatures, and grouping pottery pieces. The land is not a project. If you find a site, the only acceptable change is the depth of your own breathing.
Pack out everything you bring in — including waste
The dry climate does not decompose human waste the way wet forests do. Toilet paper persists for years and waste itself longer than that. Pack a sealable kit, carry out solid waste from popular routes, and never bury anything within a hundred yards of water, a campsite, or a cultural site. See our desert backcountry waste primer for the practical version.
Camp on durable ground, well away from sites
Never camp inside or adjacent to a structure, alcove, or rock art panel. Find established sites where possible. Use a fire ring only if one exists, and only with wood you brought in — never gather wood near a cultural site, since the surface artifacts are part of the story.
Keep groups small and quiet
Large groups concentrate impact. Sound carries in canyons in ways that are hard to predict. Speak normally rather than calling out across distances. If a place feels like a place to be quiet, listen to that.
Drones, off-trail driving, and dogs — a short word
Drones are restricted or prohibited in many parts of the monument; check before you fly. Off-trail vehicle use leaves scars visible from satellite imagery for decades. Dogs, even well-behaved ones, change the behavior of wildlife and people both — keep them leashed where they’re allowed.
Bring more curiosity than certainty
The interpretive material you find at any site — including this one — is a beginning, not the last word. The people whose ancestors built these places have their own teachings, their own names, and their own relationships with this land. Read widely. Listen to tribal voices. The longer you spend in the region the more you realize how much of it is not yours to claim.
None of this is a difficult code to follow. It is roughly the same code we follow in any place that matters to other people. The canyons just make the consequences of failure more visible.