After having every beautiful stop to ourselves along the scenic drive of Natural Bridges National Monument, we backtracked onto the main road and found the elusive driveway to the Mule Canyon trailhead which would lead us to House on Fire.

AKA the coolest thing ever.

Bears Ears National Monument is huuuge and houses all of these other tinier stops within it. We spent the longest time on these lands – two days – than any other place we went on this road trip. There’s so much to do here, and it’s the national monument that’s probably the most vulnerable to all that’s going on in the U.S. government right now.

The original reason we started planning this trip is to see as many of the desert-based NPS/BLM sites as we could, in case something happens to them. We went in April of this year, only three months into this debacle, and we still weren’t quick enough to avoid the impact of the change in policies and funding.

When you turn off the main paved road, you’re met with a bumpy gravel one that leads to the area of Mule Canyon Interpretive Site. The trailhead for House on Fire doesn’t really have a parking lot at it – just a bunch of people politely parallel parking along the road. There is a bit of an overflow lot that you pass on the way in, but you’d have to walk a pretty good distance further.

In order to day hike and/or backpack within the Cedar Mesa and Comb Ridge areas of Bears Ears, you have to buy a daily permit through recreation.gov. We printed both days of ours out at home and kept them on us, just in case.

We signed in with our names and permit number at the trail’s log book, read allll of the rules, then made our way through a dry meadow, down the dried up wash, and around the corner to the star of the show. The trail itself is a ~two mile long out-and-back.

Isn’t it so crazy to think that this is right around the corner up there?

As you scale the hill to these Anasazi ruins, make sure to write your name for fun in this logbook. The other people that were there with us didn’t see it until they saw us looking like we were rummaging around in a weird box.

There were a good amount of people here, both coming in and out. Everyone was polite enough in staying out of each others’ way but if we’re ever lucky enough to come here again, I’ll come so much earlier.

Plus, how beautiful would it be to watch this light up in the morning? I’ve read the sun beams on it best between 8am and 9am. We were here around 10:30/11am.

The ruins are so striking and I just had this feeling of total gratitude to be able to see them in person. We took fifty million pictures of it and each other.

You have the ability to look inside of the windows and lightly touch the outer bricks/rocks with your hands, but absolutely cannot lean on, pull/push on, climb, or go inside of anything.

Here’s what’s going on with the windows.

Around to the other side of the structure is the ability to climb through a little rockfall cavern and out to the other side for a different view of the area and to get away from the noise of the people on the other side haha.

… casual tree…

We turned around, returned through the little slot canyon cave area, and took one last look to soak it all in before backtracking to the car and high tailing it to our next stop: Canyonlands.

House on Fire trail via AllTrails:
https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/utah/house-on-fire

Get your Cedar Mesa/Comb Ridge day hiking permit:
https://www.recreation.gov/activitypass/50c69634-1b00-11eb-82d6-dec19ab5394e

Get your Cedar Mesa/Comb Ridge backpacking permit:
https://www.recreation.gov/permits/445861

Bears Ears National Monument trip planner:
https://www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/Utah_Cedar_Mesa_Trip_Planner.pdf

Bears Ears National Monument via the Bureau of Land Management:
https://www.blm.gov/visit/bears-ears-national-monument

Bears Ears National Monument via the U.S. Forest Service:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/visit/national-monuments/bears-ears-national-monument