Swell Hiking

Just got back from a few days of canyon hiking in the San Rafael Swell—so beautiful and yet almost empty compared to nearby Moab. We did the classic Little Wild Horse Canyon-Bell Canyon loop, with 8 miles of fantastic and varied scenery and some good bouldering to climb past pools left by a recent flash flood. Some moron(s) had scrawled names and other gibberish in the sandstone walls—even big arrows pointing up or down the canyon—every few hundred yards for much of Little Wild Horse, nearly sending me into apoplectic seizures.

A day later we hiked into towering Black Dragon Wash, where some cretin who failed second-grade art class had scratched an outline around the large, pale-red pictographs on the canyon's Navajo sandstone walls. What is with these people? I get so saddened by the thought that these mysterious images, which have lasted untouched for centuries, can't survive a decade or two of modern "adventure" tourism. I wonder if any Anasazi or Fremont images will remain unscarred in another decade or two.