Canyonlands, Day 2, The Spur

After exiting the Horseshoe Canyon section of Canyonlands NP, we continued riding east on the old oil company road.  The LaSal Mountains, near Moab, were directly ahead, looking misty.  Our destination was The Spur, a mesa top with a number of lookout points that resemble the rowels of a spur from an aerial view. 

We found this old oil well site on our route, apparently the one for which the road across Horseshoe Canyon was built.  Steve is standing on the "bull wheel" with Sugarloaf Butte in the background.  Best I can tell, this wheel acted as part of the mechanism of pulleys and cables that rotated the drill pipe as the bit forced its way into the earth.  The men would pull out the pipe periodically and sharpen the drill bit by hand, apparently by hammering on it until it formed a point again.  The process was pretty primitive. 

The clean up was primitive as well.  The old drill rig (some of the beams are behind me on the left in the photo above) was never removed, and the skeleton remains in the sand, along with the old wheel, some huge cable spools, etc.  This seems a little reminiscent of the Shelley poem, "Ozymandias."
"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies...
...Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Not all of the leavings were wasted, though.  Just up the trail a little way, some enterprising ranchers built a corral out of salvaged cable.  Waste not, want not.  One man's trash is truly another man's treasure.

The view from the Spur was impressive.   The line of rock outcroppings in the photo outline Horseshoe Canyon, from which we came.  We continued along old two-tracks and cow trails, trying to find some springs Steve had seen on his topo map and marked on his GPS.  No luck there.  Either the springs are misplaced on the map, or they have dried up since the mapping was done. 

No matter.  We rode sandy trails on a nice day, and the views alone were worth the trip.  The above photo shows the distant LaSal Mountains.  In the foreground are Navajo sandstone domes, and slightly lower are the Wingate sandstone cliffs along the Green River Gorge.  The photo is taken from the vantage point of The Spur, about 600 feet higher than the surrounding desert of the Canyonlands Maze District. Geologists say that the Navajo sandstone was formed by an eolian (windblown) process about 180 million years ago.  Uplift and subsequent erosion about 15 million years ago exposed these formations, and since that time, further erosion formed the deep canyons. The Navajo sandstone domes resemble, and essentially are, fossilized sand dunes with their characteristic crossbedding.

If you would like to read about the history of this area, I recommend a couple of fascinating interviews with Ned Chaffin, a man whose family ranched there in the '20's and '30's.  Links to the interviews are posted on the the Canyonlands National Park site, and I include them here:
http://www.nps.gov/cany/historyculture/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=529627
http://www.nps.gov/cany/historyculture/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=503334