The Story of the Rustler's Cabin

In the summer of 2001, I visited my good friend Pete Williams, who lives with his wife Tamara Naumann in the Dinosaur, Colorado area. It was one of the great trips of my life--though Pete practically killed me on a daily basis with his version of "easy" hikes. There are many pictures on this site from that trip. If you want more, here's a link to Pete and Tamara's own site, which has a wealth of stories and pictures.

One of the places Pete showed me is a place he had written to me about. Among his many talents, Pete is an immensely gifted nature writer. Below is the story as he told it to me originally in an email. There are also a number of pictures of the rustler's cabin, so you can see just how well hidden it still is.

Narrative by Peter Williams.

At a relatively obscure little dip where the road crosses a minor wash, we parked and walked a couple hundred yards downstream. The wash along this stretch is tiny--a couple of feet deep and a couple of feet wide, and bone dry. Then it reaches a pour-off where the water has cut a vertical groove a few feet back into the middle of the sharp edge of a forty-foot-high cliffrunning perpendicular to the drainage. This cliff is perhaps a hundred feetlong, stretching fifty feet or so to either side of the watercourse, and ateach end it then turns ninety degrees and parallels the course of the wash. A hundred feet downstream from the pour-off, the walls come back together, where the wash proceeds through a notch with another thirty-foot-deep pour-off at its base. The result is about a thousand square feet of enclosed real estate, hidden from the distance in every direction, and accessible by scrambling with hands and feet down breaks in the cliffs in only a few spots.

So, all this topography is unique enough, but on closer inspection it turns out that the base of the cliff on the upstream side is also undercut, creating a long, sheltering overhang perhaps ten feet high and twelve feet deep. And, tucked away where it's virtually invisible, is a log structure that, in combination with the back and top of the undercut and a few well-stacked rocks, forms a small secret "cabin." The remains of a frame enclosing small tree branches--no doubt someone's mattress--fill one corner. A shelf has been tied to one of the log walls with baling wire. Just outside, a slickrock pothole holds a puddle of water, even after weeks of no rain.

A hundred years ago, this corner of Colorado had a reputation as outlaw country. Today, Butch Cassidy (who worked for a local ranch before moving on to begin his career in robbery) gets top billing by the local chambers of commerce, but mostly the "outlaws" were a diverse bunch of individuals who made small-time livelihoods at whatever came their way, including rustling the occasional cow. The local small-time ranchers generally got along with most of these characters, as long as the rustled cows came from the larger cattle companies, for which the locals felt some (often deserved) antipathy. Indeed, many a local rancher had started out with a few rustled cows of his own. Because the area was so far from any town, and so close to several state borders, for a while it was pretty immune to any concerted effort by the law, or the cattle companies, to put a stop to the local practices. Gradually this changed, and gradually the rustlers had to either go straight or go into hiding. Perhaps this cabin was merely a line shack for someone running a few cows on the public lands. Perhaps those cows were even legal. But it's as likely (given its camouflaged situation) that it was a place for someone to stay out of sight of the authorities.