The pair of buttes known as the Bears Ears might be the most prominent features at Bears Ears National Monument, but they are only the beginning of the wonders to be found there. The national monument in southern Utah is home to an amazing mix of ancient structures, rock art, and spectacular landscapes, while also harboring a long stretch of canyons and mesas draining into the master streams of the San Juan and Colorado rivers.

I have found the monument to be a place of great beauty, with a bit of magic mixed in. Starting in the 1970s, well before the land earned its national monument designation in 2016, my friend Glen Lathrop and I would scour this territory for lost wonders. We made one of our most memorable discoveries while hiking and scrambling practically in sight of the Bears Ears themselves.

It happened when we were looking for a ruin we thought was in the area. As it turned out, we were not even close, but on this cool afternoon with summer thunderstorms threatening, we left my Jeep and made our way down the canyon walls. Soon we were bushwhacking in tall brush, but for a little while the terrain flattened out, and jutting out of the cliff wall was a perfect arch made of Cedar Mesa sandstone.

Even with all the backcountry exploring we had done, finding a new arch of this size was remarkable, and it hasn’t happened to me before or since. At that time, I was carrying a giant 4x5 camera, which now seems almost crazy, but it was my camera of choice for all those decades. I took images of my friend Glen on top of it for scale, and we joked about calling it Tom-Glen Arch, since people in Moab had named the arches they discovered after themselves.

We struggled back to the rim, found the ruin later and almost slipped into the half-mile deep canyon by driving on a four-wheel-drive trail covered with viscous pine needles on the ground, which were slippery as ice – a typical day of discovery and just enough danger to get the heart racing.

We have not returned to this arch, but since I published a picture of it, many doggedly motivated people have tried and failed to find it. I admire the arch hunter groups, and I was contacted by them and shared all the information I had. They even hired an airplane to look for it, but no luck. I occasionally think of that arch as a symbol of my lost youth and a more innocent time. The picture proved its existence, but somehow returning would have spoiled the magic of it for me.

Climber David Roberts, author of books about Bear Ears and the Southwest, visited the area 700 times. He told of his many expeditions to reach ancient ruins high on canyon walls and eroded spires within Bears Ears. In many cases he relates how, after climbing high on canyon walls, he was forced to accept defeat when a final stone barrier, erected by Ancestral Puebloans a millennium ago, kept even a master canyon explorer and world-class climber like him out. Made of rocks that were impossible for the best athletes to pass, these barriers seem to indicate, as Edward Abbey theorized, that the ancient peoples were trying to keep themselves and their food safe.

Sometimes there’s a supernatural element to the stories. A Bureau of Land Management ranger told me a story about how a part of the monument’s famous Moon House Pueblo had fallen down, but on his next regular visit, he was gobsmacked to find this part of the ruin had somehow reconstructed itself. He could have been messing with me, but he seemed sincere and almost a bit frightened by the whole thing.

I have actually climbed the two Bears Ears themselves a few times. While climbing one of them, I found the only horny toad I have ever seen in southern Utah. The spectacular view from the top of the butte covered much of Monument Valley, Black Mesa, Comb Ridge, Elk Ridge and Natural Bridges National Monument. All around me storms were exploding, with rain and lighting and clouds turning every possible color by the setting sun, so I got down pretty quickly and drove out.

A few years later, in the 1980s, I visited an ancient perfect kiva in the area. A kiva is an Ancestral Puebloan ceremonial chamber, and a perfect one has an intact roof. This one also had its original ladder, held together with strips of bighorn sheep leather, and was possibly a thousand years old.

It was hard for me to believe what I was seeing and photographing, and I was able to climb down into the kiva easily, but as I did, I stirred up a millennium’s worth of dust. Luckily, the sun rays hit the small cloud in exactly the same angle as the ladder, and the image was an accidental success, as some lucky ones are. The Bureau of Land Management did not want to leave such a beautiful and valuable article as the ladder to be vandalized or stolen, so a number of years ago it was replaced by a newly made duplicate. The original is stored at Edge of the Cedars State Park in Blanding.

Although we are in a long-lasting drought now in southern Utah, the canyons of Bears Ears are known not just for their great hiking but for their occasional danger due to water. People picture flash floods, which are killers, but an innocent pool can be just as deadly.

I once jumped into a small sandstone hole filled with cool water in the area after a long, hot hike. Finding that, because of moss growing on its sides, I was unable to climb out, I panicked. Every attempt slid me right back to the bottom. It wasn’t deep, and I pictured the headline of the story in the local paper: “Photographer dies in small pothole of water on hottest day of year.” Fortunately, I wasn’t hiking alone, and my friend easily pulled me up and out, but the advice that hikers avoid polluting desert pools with their bodies is a good idea for several reasons.

Perhaps my very favorite places in Bear Ears are not the great ruins that make you gasp as you see them around a corner, or a deep canyon with imposing walls and a black pool, but the towers of the Valley of the Gods, the huge and almost endless uplift of Comb Ridge and, finally, the San Juan River.

The many buttes of the Valley of the Gods, seen from the air with the psychedelic patterns of the Raplee Anticline behind the dozen or so monoliths there, have great majesty. Though the Raplee Anticline is not in the monument but on Navajo lands, it can be seen from the highway to Mexican Hat. From the air, it is one of the most amazing photographic subjects in the world.

Very reminiscent of Monument Valley, the Valley of the Gods is also a photographer’s paradise. Formations with names like Castle Butte, the Seven Sailors Butte and Battleship Butte are just a few. Just to the east, Comb Ridge stretches through the whole monument down to Navajo lands, as the San Juan River invades it all with a usually slow pace that children can enjoy. I took my kids down that river when they were little, and they now take their children.

The list of wonders in this part of Utah is endless: Beauty, fun, history, magic and mystery are all here.