Exploring Ancestral Puebloan Ruins by Bike

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Thanks so much to Doug Artman for letting us share his April 2024 blog post about his adventures exploring Ancestral Puebloan ruins into the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park with our guide, Jon Bailey, and fellow bike explorer Bay. It was early season, so cool and refreshing out. The river was not too high, so wet feet weren’t a huge worry. And with our newly-permitted access in the Park, the crew was able to explore some otherwise unexplored (by us) areas. As always, we are so grateful to the Ute Mountain Utes for allowing us to visit their sacred lands, as well as to the Ancestral Puebloans who let us walk through their ancient homes.

Photos & story by Doug Artman

It’s hard to resist a good ruin. Ute Mountain Tribal Park is a much larger, more under-visited and less developed version of Mesa Verde National Park. You can’t enter the park without a permit and generally you must be accompanied by a local Native American guide.

Four Corner Guides, located in Mancos Colo., and run by Lizzy Scully and Steve Fassbinder, is the only guiding company allowed to tour the Park via bicycle. After considering doing this tour for a couple years and although I normally don’t do guided trips, I wanted to see these Ancestral Puebloan ruins. I don’t know Lizzy or Steve personally, but I have known of them and followed their adventures for years. It all seemed a great fit, so I finally signed up.

April 18

Arriving in the appointed place, at the appointed time, I met Lizzy and Saddle, her energetic Border Collie. Soon Bay showed up, the only other participant on the tour. While Lizzy snugged up some final details and ran some errands in town, Bay myself and Ian, who is Steve’s cousin and helps out with pretty much whatever needs doing, rode our bikes back down to “Scullbinder Ranch.” Four Corners Guides base of operations where Lizzy met us again. Lizzy cooked up an amazing salmon dinner for the four of us and after dinner Ian helped setting up Bay’s ride for bikepacking.

April 19

In the morning Lizzy shuttled Bay and I with our bikes and gear to the start of the ride which in our case was a little east of Mancos at Cherry Creek. There we met our guide Jon. Jon has massive experience earned through multiple hard core adventures throughout the Fours Corners region, Alaska and beyond. I felt lucky to have him with us.

We had a pretty easy day of riding 36 miles across plateau country before an exhilarating 1000-foot descent to the Mancos River inside the Tribal Park. Arriving relatively early at the campground in the canyon bottom we took a walk to Kiva Point experiencing the thrill of discovery on finding many pot shards and rock art. Ricky, our Ute Guide for the ruins tour tomorrow happened by while we were in camp. He confirmed our meeting the following day for our tour and with a few additional folks. After that we just just nestled into camp and eventually drifted off to sleep.

April 20

The emergence of humans…

Ricky and the additional tourists showed up right on time. And with that our tour began. We initially stopped at a rock art panel where Ricky explained the entire emergence of humans upon the landscape and the four epochs of time in which humans have inhabited the land. As Ricky relayed it, we are currently within the fourth epoch. The legend (or truth?) of the existence of humankind was truly fascinating to hear from an entirely different perspective.

The Indescribable Lion CAnyon

From there, we visited the ancient ruins in Lion Canyon, which are Indescribable. You just have to see and experience them for yourself. We started at a view point for ‘Fortification Ruins,’ inaccessible ruins located in an alcove below a sheer cliff. We saw great views from the canyon rim.

Keep your eyes peeled too as I found an ancient arrowhead that even Ricky was surprised to see. (It bears mentioning here that any and all artifacts must be left in place!)

From there we again piled into the van and drove around to the north rim of Lion Canyon. A trail led down to the cliff edge where we climbed down a log ladder to access the ledge trail used to approach the four different dwelling sites. There is simply too much to see in these various sites to attempt to describe within this short blog. Kivas, rooms, multi-story dwellings, ancient pictographs and petroglyphs and pottery shards etc.

The Long Ladder

At Eagles Nest ruin there is a mandatory 30 ft log ladder used to access the ruin. A couple of folks opted to take a pass on this climb and waited on the ledge below. Eventually we made our way back to the van and thence back to our camp in the canyon. We had packed our bikes in the morning so we were quickly back on our bikes and made our way a relatively short distance up canyon to where we made our final camp.

April 21

Four Corners Guides has an agreement with the tribe that allowed us to do a bit of exploration on our own without a tribal guide. We spent the first half of the day hiking and exploring a bit then jumped on our bikes for the final 14 mile ride back up canyon to Scullbinder Ranch.

I highly recommend this trip to anyone with an interest in ancient culture and has a bit of cycling experience even if not bikepacking. Four Corners Guides has some extra loaner bikepacking bags to help outfit your bike for the trip. Lizzy is extremely gracious and accommodating and Steve “Doom” Fassbinder has as much or more experience in various modes of travel from packrafts to bicycles as anyone in the Four Corners region. And all of their guides are the most experienced and capable outdoor people you are ever likely to meet. And speaking of packrafts, they specialize in packraft instruction from beginner to expert as well as putting it all together with bikerafting.