Before the summer rains arrived, the winds blew relentlessly across the Colorado Plateau. They heightened drought conditions and increased fire danger. But wind isn’t always a destructive force. Sometimes it’s an artist. In his latest Canyon Commentary, Scott Thybony takes a look at the positive side of wind by exploring a spectacular wind-carved landscape.
Fierce winds often sweep across the Southwest, spreading fast-moving wildfires and kicking up dust storms. But over thousands of years they have also carved some of the most beautiful landscapes in the region. And one of the finest required a search to find it.
An old aerial photo of an escarpment rising 1,000 feet from the Painted Desert first caught my eye. I had driven along its base for years without suspecting anything of particular interest on the backside. But the black-and-white image showed a knobby expanse of sandstone resembling the well-known Coyote Buttes in southern Utah. Checking the topo map showed a possible route but not an easy one.
One morning I took off alone with the idea of finding a way into it. Leaving the truck I approached the cliffs and found a break in the lowest band of rock. It led to a cone of loose talus covering hundreds of feet of the upper cliffs. I began climbing, and the steep slope angled even higher near the crest. After catching my breath at the top, I descended into an intriguing expanse of domes and hollows weathered into the Navajo Sandstone. A few junipers had gathered in the troughs between them, leaving the rest bare rock. Never having heard about it, I was entering what for me was an unknown landscape.
Cut into solid rock, narrow canyons ran parallel like fingers of a hand. When one pinched out, I crossed into the next deep cleft. Several hidden pockets held water. Out of habit I marked these on the map and kept going, soon passing the bleached skull of a coyote. Above it the slickrock had the appearance of giant, overlapping scales adding to the strangeness of the setting. Working deeper into the sandstone maze, I passed thin crossbedded layers formed by Jurassic winds blowing across a desert millions of years ago.
Using friction alone to keep from sliding, I carefully descended a rock face to the wash. A hollow alcove had been scooped out of the facing cliff. It appeared so pristine, I circled around a mound of sand to avoid leaving tracks. Graceful lines traced across the backwall in a swirling flow where a shelf had been thinned to a tapering fin. Below it a weathered potsherd and a piece of petrified wood indicated others had been here long ago. After sitting for a moment in this place of sanctuary, I moved on.
Up ahead a barrier cliff appeared too steep to climb until a closer look showed a vertical fissure leading to a notch. Wedging my feet in the crack, I scrambled to the top and found myself in a circular chamber sunk 100 feet into the rock and almost as wide. The immense size surprised me. Smooth cliffs dropped to a floor of untracked sand with a few tufts of bent grass showing where a vortex had spiraled down to the very bottom. The deep pocket had formed over the centuries by winds sweeping across the desert and hitting the escarpment, creating turbulence as they tumbled over the crest. In this particular spot the wind kept turning upon itself, auguring deep into the bedrock.
From where I stood, the cliff flared overhead to resemble a massive wave turned to stone. Thin lines of red angled across the mural wall with a speckling of Ganado red on the pale sandstone. Swirling air had hollowed out the chamber and uncovered the buried strata, revealing the heart of the rock. I found myself in what we came to call the House of Winds.
Weavers in the western Navajo Nation often use the Storm Pattern design for their rugs. Into each corner they place a square sometimes identified as the house of winds. Heading back, I left the slickrock wilderness behind and reached the crest of the ridge. I stood looking over the high desert, across a vast landscape where women still weave the house of winds into their rugs.
