Traveling Home

On the way home we stopped at a few places. First we stopped at some bike trails near Moab. John’s cough got worse as we biked, so we didn’t stay long. We did find what looked like an old western tourist town. It was all closed up but still had things in the gift shop and other buildings, and lots of horse poop everywhere.

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Thompson and Sego Canyons

After the bike trails we went to Thompson Canyon to see some Petroglyphs.

We explored the washes around the petroglyphs because they had interesting rock formations. We also found some interesting rocks.

You can see the motorhome in the distance.

At the end of this wash was a dead-end where the water gets stopped up. There was still water in it and the sides of the walls were wet. This one also had an arch in it.

John looking for creatures under rocks. He found another scorpion.

Sego Canyon Ghost Town

We took a drive further up in the canyon and came across several old ruins of houses. Then we came upon the ruins of what looked like an old town. We wondered why anyone would build a town out in the middle of nowhere. We found out it used to be a coal mining town. The town had lots of problems like not enough water, flash floods wiping out the train bridges, and then in 1950 it was closed for good when trains went to diesel fuel instead of coal powered steam engines..

Coal miners lived in dugout houses like this. A huge stone had crashed through the back wall of this dugout house.

This was the coal company store. It was a three story building. Across the street was a boarding house for the single coal working men.

This is what the town originally looked like. It had 200 residents in its heyday. The white building is the boarding house and the building in the middle is the company store.

This is what’s left of one of the train bridges over the wash. Flash floods destroyed the others.

We also came across the Sego Canyon cemetery. It had some old headstones and some marked only with a pile of stones. A couple of the graves were women from the coal mining time period of that died young like 22 and 34.

This grave is a a man that died in 1918. He was from Italy.

John also explored this opening while we were in Sego Canyon. It looks like a vein of coal.

While in the canyon we heard cows mooing loudly. it was a roundup and the cows weren’t too happy about it. The cowboys leave their cows in the canyon in the fall and pick them up in the spring. They rounded them up with their horses and dogs into pens by the rock art and then switched them on their rumps to get them to move into the truck. It was fascinating and they let us watch.

Nine Mile Canyon

We stayed the night at a truck stop after Sego Canyon, and then we went to Price (a large dying mining town). Next to Price was a road to Nine Mile Canyon. Nathan had said it had lots of Indian wall art, so we decided to check it out. We drove the jeep, and it was cold. Also, it was about 40-50 miles to the canyon. There were lots of pictographs and petroglyphs (about 1,000 panels altogether) but most weren’t as interesting as others we had seen. It mostly of goats, but there were some pretty rock formations and some old buildings. There were also some underwhelming looking Native American pit houses and granaries.

We stopped at an old homestead that you could picnic at. There was a cabin, corrals, a well, a storage bunker, a stream, and an old stone fireplace.

There were several places along the road to stop and look at Native American pictographs. There was also a hiking spot in a canyon where several were located.

Thompson and Sego Canyons

Sego Canyon Ghost Town

Nine Mile Canyon

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