If only these walls could talk... Kirks Cabin in Canyonlands’ Salt Creek

The memories of my formative years on this spot of earth have made it the only place I can ever call home.
The rugged canyons, dressed in their colors, vivid and changeable, along with its history and people, have forever become part of who I am.
Salt Creek Canyon is close to the top of my long list of favorite places. It is where I first learned the full breadth of the beauty of a sunrise.
There, I learned not to always look east at daybreak. In Salt Creek, the best show is seen by looking at the canyon’s west wall.
Only there will you witness the melting of the night shadows to reveal the resplendent colors of the sandstone woven together with those of the desert’s bold vegetation.
I was 14 when I first visited Upper Salt Creek. It was 1968, and the newly minted national park was four years old. It had been rechristened from “The Needles” to Canyonlands. Salt Creek was its southernmost feature. 
My neighborhood friends, scout leaders, and I were dropped off at the trailhead on the west side of Cathedral Butte on North Elk.
About 100 feet from the start, the trail appears to end in a sheer drop. I tiptoed to the edge and peered over.
It wasn’t a sheer drop, but it was close and promised to be one of those descents that leaves your quads feeling like someone injected acid in them.
Buckley Jensen, our new scoutmaster, deliberately planned the trip to a place only accessible on foot or horseback to prepare us for the next year when we descended into an even more remote spot—Dark Canyon.
It was my first experience backpacking; I was carrying somewhere between 40 and 50 pounds, a little heavier than what we take now. The lighter freeze-dried meals of today with their attendant gastrointestinal rumblings had not yet arrived.
Four miles and a couple of hours trek from the trailhead lies Kirk’s Cabin, one of the few structures in the canyon built by white men.
Most likely constructed in the mid-to-late 1880s, it is unique among local cabins of the period due to its shallow, dovetail-joined corners and the use of drilled holes and wooden pegs to stabilize the walls.
The hand-hewn local cottonwood logs that make up the walls sit atop a dry-laid sandstone foundation. Still in remarkable condition after more than a century of life, the cabin has had some reconstruction, but spotting the specifics of any changes takes an eye more skilled than mine.
Near the cabin are the remnants of two corrals and a few hundred yards of strategically placed fencing, telling of a time when cowboys used the site as a working line camp.
The construction methods, using holes and wooden pegs, indicate that the same hands built both the cabin and the corrals.
In 1911, the leader of the original government survey crew, tasked with monumenting the section corners in the area, optimistically described 30 acres with irrigation ditches near the cabin and corrals as “a meadow” capable of producing good hay—a hopeful sentiment indeed.
A few feet from the cabin’s south wall lies a derelict wagon that hasn’t moved in 100 years or more.
Since my first trip, I’ve visited the site five or six times, the last being a couple of weeks ago. I stare at the wagon each time, close my eyes, and try to visualize how it got there.
There was never, nor will there ever be, a wagon road linking the place with civilization. In the days before the park was created, and for a few years afterward, jeeps were allowed to drive up Salt Creek to Angel Arch.
More skilled jeep operators often ventured a few miles farther up the canyon but could never get beyond “The Jump,” an impassable sandstone pour-off a few miles from the cabin.
There is only one explanation for the wagon’s existence up the canyon from The Jump — it was disassembled below it, then carried past the obstacle piece by piece, either by hand or on a pack animal, reassembled, and used locally.
Its useful life ended where it now lies. The horses that pulled it were unhitched, put out to pasture, or sent to other tasks. The wagon and the cabin next to it have become, and will remain, monuments for people like us to ponder.
Like most artifacts of the past, the cabin generates a multitude of questions in my mind.
Who built it?
Why here?
What dreams dominated the builder’s thoughts as they listened to the spring waters cascade over the rocks a short distance away?
How did they get these massive logs in place?
However, my strongest wish is to know the people involved—those who built and used it before the park existed. 
Yes, I would give anything if these log walls could talk.
(This article is the first in a multi-part story. The next installment will be about the people.)