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				The Secret Canyon Part 1 - Sites Everywhere Range Creek canyon in Utah long held a secret that became public only when a rancher sold his land to the state - well-preserved remains from when the Fremont people lived here 1000 years ago.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: Native Americans called this plateau Tavaputs-- "Sunrise." Our crew is cautiously picking its way down a cattle trail from the Tavaputs Plateau into a deep canyon. It'll take about an hour to drop down the thousand feet into the valley below. We've come to a remote corner of eastern Utah, to a rugged country of high plateaus and deep canyons. Our destination: Range Creek Canyon. Our guide in the canyon will be Duncan Metcalfe, an archaeologist from the University of Utah. In 2002, Range Creek was bought from a cattle rancher by the federal government and the state of Utah, but that doesn't mean the public has free access. As we'll see, figuring out how to preserve and protect what's inside the gate is going to be a major challenge. It's fair to say that for the number and state of preservation of its archaeological sites, Range Creek may be unique in North America. This is our third year of work in Range Creek. The first year we only spent seven days in here and recorded 77 sites. And that's a phenomenal rate. I've been working in archaeology for about 25 years, and I've seen perhaps half a dozen sites that I knew were absolutely undisturbed-- half a dozen. Here so far we've seen over 200. You can stop anyplace inside this ranch and point to archaeological sites. So, down at the end of this sort of view, there's this large rock ridge coming down. If you look up about halfway, you'll see a stick pointing up, and it's actually got some adobe around it. That's an eroded granary. If you look over at this ridge line, which is the north confluence of Bear Creek and what's called Waldo's Rock or Locomotive Rock, there's eight sites on the south side of it, and right at the back, on the other side, there's one of these remote granaries. ALDA: Archaeologists call the people who lived here in the canyon the Fremont. Of all the ancient peoples of America, the Fremont are among the most enigmatic. Why did they build houses in such inconvenient places? This circular space is the remains of a pit house on the summit of a rock pinnacle. Why did they put their granaries, used for storing food, in such inaccessible sites? Why did they paint and draw and carve on rock faces everywhere? And why did they suddenly stop doing all these things around 1300 A.D.? With the canyon's treasure trove of undisturbed sites, archaeologists might finally get to answer those questions. METCALFE: There aren't holes in the pit houses, we don't find beer cans on them, there's no bullet holes on the rock art panels, they haven't been chalked, there's not historic graffiti on them. They're absolutely pristine. ALDA: The water of Range Creek itself would have been the first attraction of the canyon. The Fremont, who lived throughout what's now Utah, depended on a combination of hunting and gathering and agriculture. Corn was their most important crop. First domesticated in Mexico 5,000 years ago, it had gradually spread north. We know the Fremont started growing corn in a big way about 1,500 years ago, when village settlements began to appear. In Range Creek, it seems the storage of corn became a major preoccupation. If you look up at that large block of stone, that sort of monolith by itself, about center and halfway up it on a small shelf, you'll see the remains of... looks like a two-bin-- I actually think it's a three-bin-- granary. This is one of the easiest ones. It's not real far up and it's not real far down from the top. You can just imagine the amount of work that went into constructing them. They're made out of mud and stone. All the mud had to have come out of Range Creek, which is on the other side of the valley floor from here-- it may have been a little bit different a thousand years ago. All the stone, all the mud, had to be carried up to that location to build that, as well as the timbers that are used in its construction. ALDA: So far, the archaeologists have identified 38 granaries, many completely inaccessible but some not so hard to reach. Take Lost Cow Granary, so called because the rancher ran across it while checking a side canyon for a missing cow. It's right down here. Oh, I see it. ALDA: Lost Cow Granary is a puzzle. It's not completely hidden and not very inaccessible. So it's not the best protection for your corn while you're away hunting, for example. But it is high enough up to avoid flash floods and built solidly enough to be rat-proof. WOMAN: This structure is made of adobe and undressed stone in layers, so they've got different courses coming all the way up with adobe pressed in between. And then at the top, there's a series of timbers that come... we've got at least six in this one-- they come across and then cross the other way to form a rectangle, and then there are stone slabs underneath and adobe pressed and then a rectangular opening with a lid. ALDA: It's still about half full-- of what, we won't know until it's excavated. And they're going to radiocarbon-date its timbers, because the leading theory is that the high, inaccessible granaries were built when times were hard, toward the end of the Fremont occupation here. So lower granaries would date from earlier, easier days. This theory of "higher later" could apply not just to granaries but whole villages. MAN: There are some villages way up high-- 900 to a thousand feet above the valley floor-- on precipices, on cliff edges, clearly a place where it would be difficult to live-- you're a thousand above your water and your fields-- and also a difficult place to get to, but also dangerous. Not a great place to raise children, probably, not a good place to have Grandma scrambling around and risking her life. So clearly, when people are moving into a situation like that, the thing that worries them, I think, is greater than their fear of falling off the cliff or having to climb up and down these cliffs. And what we're interested in is finding out what that might be. ALDA: In our next story, we're going to hike up the canyon sides to see what one of the high-level Fremont villages can show us.

				The Secret Canyon Part 2 - Living in the Sky A closer look at the remote areas of Range Creek the Fremont occupied and the kinds of artifacts and art that have been discovered so far.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: A 900-foot climb is usually the kind of mission that graduate students get assigned, and sure enough, Joel Boomgarden and Shannon Arnold are students from Duncan Metcalfe's lab at the University of Utah. They stop first just below the top to revisit a cave the rancher pointed out on their first survey. It was typical of the Fremont to be flexible. They were hunters and farmers; they used deep caves and shallow rock shelters; they built houses. This cave contains what archaeologists call a cist, and it used to contain other things, too. BOOMGARDEN: This is the remains of a storage cist. This box right here comes around the back. There's another one of the vertical slabs. You can actually see the mud packed in the crack over here still to keep the varmints out. When we first came up here in 2002, there was a pretty big chunk of pottery up here. It was the neck of a vessel and part of the body. It's since disappeared. ALDA: Whoever took the pottery missed this block of sandstone, used for shaping wooden shafts, and fortunately did not vandalize the mysterious lines cut into the wall. The cave is a good candidate for excavation. A couple of feet of sand has flaked down from the roof over the last thousand years, covering what undoubtedly was a floor-- with whatever may be sitting on it. Joel and Shannon continue their climb to the top. It's not the canyon rim but a thin knife-edge of rock within the canyon that contains a cave the archaeologists refer to as the "deluxe apartment in the sky." The cave was not a casual or temporary shelter. The Fremont put a lot of work into it-- a wall in front, a floor inside. BOOMGARDEN: There's different colors of mud packed in here. I can see at least five different colors of mud, so either they couldn't get all the mud in at once, or it looks like they're just patching up, making repairs to it at different times, and they're just using different colors of mud. This site looks definitely defensive. There's no other reason to haul stuff way up here. ALDA: Defensive, perhaps. Inside, there's a beautifully preserved storage bin, now empty. You can see the maker's finger marks in the adobe. As with all the sites in the canyon, the cave has not yet been excavated or even systematically surveyed. The Fremont really did live up here. There's a corn grinding stone outside and corn cobs everywhere. There's actually more corn right here. ALDA: In fact, there was a whole village up on this rock pinnacle, probably including Grandma and the kids. There are the remains of half a dozen houses, like this circle of stones from a pit house, perched right next to a thousand-foot drop. It was clearly very important to be here, but whether it was to fight off invaders or maybe to be closer to the gods, right now we don't know. Back in the lab in Salt Lake City, Joel and Shannon are beginning what will be the endless task of sorting and cataloging the Range Creek materials. Eventually there are going to be millions of pieces. They've literally not yet scratched the surface, but they've stumbled across some great finds. These corn cobs are very healthy-l@@ooking, so when they're dated, we'll know times were good then. A corn cob still on its drying stick. A beautifully preserved cedar digging stick, used for planting. Rope made with as yet unidentified fibers. The base of a basket, made with the characteristic Fremont technique. A raw material cache-- dried grass and cedar bark. All this is around a thousand years or more old. rPottery: the redware probably came from the Anasazi people to the south; plain gray painted and incised styles are Fremont. A beautiful and unique spade made of cottonwood. It's too soft to dig with, but maybe it was a trowel for adobe. Many stone blades and arrowheads, some showing expert work. And a priceless set of arrows made from reeds, carefully bound with sinew to prevent splitting, with detachable greasewood foreshafts that remain stuck in the victim-- animal or human. So far, the archaeologists have spent three short summer seasons in the canyon. Winter always gets below freezing-- one reason the Fremont's stock of corn in their granaries must have been so vital. Today, Joel and Shannon are working in a village that had about a dozen pit houses like this. The village is just 30 feet above the valley floor, safe from flash floods but certainly not as defensible as the apartment in the sky. The site is simply littered with artifacts-- broken pottery, arrowheads, personal jewelry perhaps. Who knows what treasures and what insights into the Fremont people lie underground? So far they've surveyed only five percent of the canyon's area, and have about 300 significant sites: granaries, pit houses, caves, rock art panels. ( device beeps ) ARNOLD: Got it. ALDA: At that rate there'll be a staggering and unprecedented 6,000 sites here. So, how are they going to handle it? Slowly, says Duncan Metcalfe. In Range Creek, as well as deluxe apartments, we have the luxury of time. METCALFE: There are lots of things that have to be excavated today, because if we don't, they're bulldozed tomorrow. This isn't one of those cases. This is a case where we can literally say, "Let's think about this-- "let's think about excavating over the next 20 years ten sites very, very carefully." Um... at the end of ten years, someone else might come in and say, "Gee, you know, I've got a couple of research questions that I think I could address by doing some further excavation." Good. Maybe another five sites. But preserve the vast majority of them for when we have tech... There'll be techniques that archaeologists will have to employ that I can't even imagine, you know? It's... it's not changing as fast as genetics research, but it is changing, and we need to preserve the basic library for the folks in the future. ALDA: One of the most tantalizing things about the Fremont is their rock art. They created it everywhere they lived, and the canyon is no exception, with 50 sites discovered so far. In some cases it's obvious what the artist was showing: animals like snakes or bighorn sheep from the hunt. There are symbols we understand, like the sun... and symbols we don't. They showed themselves often, sometimes richly dressed-- in ceremonial ways perhaps, with deer antler headdresses, or elaborate necklaces, belts and sashes. It's possible these pictures show leaders or shamans from the time when corn growing was at its peak. Evidence from Fremont sites elsewhere shows that high-ranking men consumed the most corn, probably from ritual drinking of corn beer. Whatever the art depicts, it all came to a crashing halt 700 years ago. METCALFE: At about 1300 A.D., there's a change. People stop building relatively substantial structures, they stop making very fine pottery, there's a change in basketry. It looks like a pretty firm break. So, is that a group of people coming in and displacing the Fremont, replacing them, or is it that farming becomes absolutely untenable in this region and people stop farming and return to hunting and gathering, which they'd been doing 1,300 years earlier. Which of those two things happened at 1300? ALDA: What happened at 1300 is one of the biggest questions in American archaeology. Sudden change was widespread, societies collapsed, including, most famously, the pueblo-building Anasazi people. The promise of Range Creek Canyon is that, with its thousands of undisturbed sites, we can come to understand those momentous events.

				The Secret Canyon Part 3 - A Day with Waldo Waldo Wilcox, the rancher who sold this land to the state of Utah, leads a tour through the canyon, on foot and in a helicopter.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: Range Creek Canyon widens out a little at its southern end. This is where the buildings are for the ranch that the Wilcox family ran here. Waldo Wilcox left in 2001, when he sold the canyon to the government. The family had lived here since 1951... Come on, Sarah. ALDA: When Waldo's dad, Budge, moved down from the neighboring Tavaputs Plateau. Here's Budge Wilcox with his pack mules. Here's Don, Waldo's brother, at Lost Cow Granary. Although there's been ranching in the canyon since the 1880s, there was no road access until just before the Wilcoxes arrived. That's what preserved the canyon's historic remains-- that and the respectful attitude of the Wilcox family, especially toward the many burials in the canyon. WILCOX: I believe in treating people the way I want to be treated, and when I die, I don't want somebody digging me up and picking the gold out of my teeth. And my dad told me when we come here that we own the land, but we don't own the dead people that's there. Leave them where you find them. ALDA: We invited Waldo to take a ride and point out some of his discoveries. After 50 years of hunting and chasing lost cows, he knows the historic sites better than anyone. WILCOX: We're going to go up the little canyon here and out on top up by the fortress. I want to go right up over the top there. ALDA: Waldo climbed onto this spectacular rock pinnacle one day when he was out hunting. His dogs had chased a mountain lion all the way up to the top. Right there's ]kthe way you get up. There's that pile of rocks. ALDA: The lion got the better of the dogs, but Waldo made a discovery: rocks piled up at the access points, seemingly either as barriers or aH’s missiles to bombard invaders with. That's why he calls it the "fortress." There was a village perched up here-- maybe the most precariously sited in the canyon. You can see the telltale stone circles of collapsed pit houses. WILCOX: That's a big old –pit house right there. Probably the governor h’lived there. Stay just underneath, and there's some granaries right... right here somewhere. Okay, there's one of the granaries right there. ALDA: Was this complex defensive, built to protect precious corn supplies as agriculture began to fail? Was it to fight off foreign invade?rs? Or was it perhaps a religious colony? One day archaeologists may be able to tell us. Next we head across to an enormous rock painting that Waldo had seen only from below. See that yellow and white shield? And a man of some kind, just to the right of it. ALDA: There's also a suicidally positioned house. Down below, there's some poles from a house. That'd be a pit house right there. I didn't know that house was there, where they lived. That's the first time I've seen that. ALDA: Next, an apparently unreachable granary, again with what's probably house remains. See the granary? That's a good one there. Nobody's ever been in there, I'll bet on that. ALDA: It's really only from this vantage point that you can appreciate how precarious and dangerous the Fremont houses and villages were. Whatever drove these people up the cliffs and onto the rock pinnacles must have been a powerful force. Waldo's been fascinated for 50 years. I don't know if you enjoyed it, but I sure as hell did. ALDA: In his time in the canyon, Waldo got to know a lot of Fremont rock art. He's taking us to one of his favorite examples. Some of them's hunting scenes, and others are probably something to do with their religion. I think they was a religious people, very religious. Now, it's right over in them rocks right there. ALDA: Here, close to the creek, the Fremont used a rock overhang as a shelter, and it's now a sad sight. A second road connected into the canyon in 1961, and it soon had consequences that Waldo regrets. This is what's left of a pit house. They piled these rocks up to protect themselves from the wind. But it's been all dug out. People's been looking for pottery and stuff here, and it's so close to the gate that it's been destroyed. I seen it for the first time in 1941, and the bottom was all smooth. And that's one way you can tell if they've... anybody's been there looti¨ng it, because they leave it uneven. ALDA: On the overhang ¨above the looted house, ghostly figures of the people who lived here-- not vandalized but slowly fading into the rock face. What they painted it for, I don't know and I don't know that anybody will ever know. But they left it for us to look at anyway, and I hope it can be protected. ALDA: Preserve it and solve its mysteries-- the twin challenges that lie ahead for Range Creek Canyon.