Cowboy Cave

You can see two caves just above the junipers on the right hand side of the above photo. The larger one is known as Cowboy Cave. We call the smaller one the mother-in-law cave, but its official name is Walter's Cave.  To read about our first visit to these caves, click here. 
Both caves are carved from Navajo sandstone and have been excavated by archeologists.  They found many interesting artifacts that are thousands of years old.

The above photo is from the University of Utah's Anthropological Papers Number 104, 1980, titled "Cowboy Cave" by Jesse D. Jennings.  The photo from the book shows examples of sandals and woven objects the archeology team discovered.

One 8000 year old sandal was found.  The dung of mammoth, bison, an extinct type of horse, camel and sloth was recovered from these caves. Ornaments, leather pouches, unfired clay figurines, split-twig figurines,

an atlatl shaft, many arrowheads, rope snares, and lots of other objects from ancient daily life was present.  All of it was removed to the Utah Museum of Natural History (located on the U. of Utah campus).  I don't know if the artifacts are on display at this time.

I liked looking out through the picture window of the ancient ones, who predated the Anasazi.

Steve and Daisy made interesting silhouettes, reminding me of "The Allegory of the Cave," found in Plato's Republic, describing people who lived their lives seeing only shadows of the life occuring outside. Illusion became their reality. 
Surprisingly, we found a group of about 10 college aged kids from Missoula camped near the cave.  Way out in the middle of nowhere, you don't expect to see anyone, but hikers tend to be friendly folk.  We stopped and visited for a few minutes before moving on.