McCarty was headed for a canyon hideout, but instead, he and his brother died in the dust of Delta’s dirt streets. Four years later, Tom McCarty robbed the Delta Bank only to be shot by a hardware store owner with a buffalo gun so powerful that it lifted the robber out of his saddle, dead before he hit the ground. The McCarty Trail is a landscape feature named after the McCarty family whose brothers rode with Butch Cassidy to rob the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride in 1889. Certainly, outlaws did.Įscalante Canyon to the south and Dominguez Canyon to the north, both parts of the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area, made perfect hideouts for cattle rustlers and bank robbers. The Uncompahgre band, Weminuche band and Grand River band of Utes may all have traversed this canyon at different times of year. Ute-style rock art goes from 1600 to 1880, including shield figures and a bison hunting scene with Native Americans on horseback surrounding a bison dripping blood. with carved deer and elk, bear paws and a variety of anthropomorphs, or human-animal figures. Petroglyphs include Archaic styles from 1000 B.C. The canyon is a rare palimpsest of time with layer after layer of geology and human history. Wooley Built This House March the 18, 1901.” Etched on the back are the printed words: “M.A. It provides shelter during summer rainstorms. Farther along the trail, hikers can spot a large boulder with dry-laid stone walls underneath. Walking up the canyon, visitors see a corral from the Herbert “Bert” Ennors homestead, though the house has burned and no traces of it remain. Hikers enter the wilderness where a gate post is an upturned wagon axle installed by pioneers, who lived by the adage of “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” It’s a pity that Franciscan friars Father Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre de Escalante never got to visit their namesake canyons, but plenty of Native Americans, prospectors, ranchers, railroaders and outlaws certainly have. Geology, botany, natural history – all abound in Dominguez Canyon, named in 1874 by the Hayden Expedition as it mapped Colorado’s Western Slope. Highway 550 south of Grand Junction at Bridgeport Road.
But even in the dead of winter, Dominguez is easy to get to off U.S. I love to arrive by canoe from Delta or Escalante Canyon and camp at one of the four campsites at the mouth of Dominguez Creek.
Re-introduced desert bighorns stare from cliffs above or silhouette themselves on the skyline at sunset, which is perfect entertainment for beer-drinking campers below. Visitors can rest in the shade of cottonwoods and, using binoculars, spy birds like cliff swallows, canyon wrens, ravens, bald eagles, goldfinches, Western towhees, orioles, hummingbirds and, my favorite, small blue gray gnat catchers. In high summer with temperatures in the 90s, the bare-breasted, brown-bottomed skinny dipper is frequently seen in these marvelous pools and is definitely not an endangered species. They do their push-ups and scamper across red rocks. Collared lizards enact marvelous mating dances. Rare plants and animals with prickly pear cactus and Indian rice grass grow within feet of narrow-leaf Fremont cottonwood trees. Where the schist has been carved by millions of years of water runoff from the Uncompahgre Plateau to the west, there are pour-offs and pools as smooth as a newborn’s bottom. The bottom of Dominguez Creek has hard, brittle, blue-gray rock, yet all around are red sandstone cliffs. Hikers can see it in the Grand Canyon or you can hike into the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness along the Gunnison River between Delta and Grand Junction. Geologists call this missing strata The Great Unconformity. Several hundred million years of geology are missing between the cliff tops and the creek bottom. Yet the visible cliffs are 300 million-year-old Chinle sandstone. Dominguez Creek has some of the oldest rocks in the world from the Uncompahgre schist at 1.4 billion to 1.8 billion years old. One of my favorites is a place in Colorado that looks and feels like Utah, except rocks are gone. As the snow piles up, I think of warm desert hikes.
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