Slickhorn Kiva
Located on the Cedar Mesa plateau, San Juan County, UT. this kiva is over 700-years old.
A kiva is a circular room used for ceremonial rituals and other communal purposes. The kivas, located in the Southwest, were used by the ancient Ancestral Puebloans. There are a few kivas in Cedar Mesa but this one is one of the most intact and perfectly preserved kivas. The only replacement that has been made is the ladder, which the original is now in a museum.
The hike was pretty intense and required a 4WD vehicle to even get to the trailhead. A few steps into the canyon, there was a cow. My wife and I both found it cute... Then it growled at us... Not a "moo," a growl. Did you know that a cow could growl? We took a few more steps forward and it looked as if she was going to charge us. We had to make a fairly large detour around the cow from that point.
The next 2 hours, we had to negotiate several dryfalls, one of which took us to the completely opposite canyon rim, some 250-300 feet above the canyon floor, and we had to half scramble/half climb down to the canyon floor, then rinse and repeat going back up towards the other canyon rim and the kiva.
There is a BLM box up there with a notebook to sign in, it was dated 2008, but wasn't even half full of signatures. The last sign-in was a week before we arrived. The sign-in before that was back in November (nearly 4 months before). After completing a hike of that nature, you better believe we signed it! The beam of light was almost perfectly in the center of the kiva, which is exactly what I was hoping for. We spread a little dust in the air, careful not to breathe it in, and I got my shots.
We then had the same 2 hour hike in reverse, back out of the canyon. I could not see doing this hike in mid-summer. It was exhausting enough in the 60 degree weather we had. But either way, we made it back and I got the shot that I wanted.
I was literally wrapped along the wall of the kiva with the tripod and camera inches from the wall. I had to half guess that I was in focus and the comp was right, because I could barely see the Live View screen in that position.
