Cave Spring Loop

The Cave Spring Loop is a short but historically rich trail in the Needles District, leading to a preserved cowboy line camp used by ranchers from the late 1800s through 1975 when the national park acquired the grazing allotments. The camp shelters beneath a broad sandstone overhang that has provided shade and protection for thousands of years — prehistoric Ancestral Puebloan pictographs and handprints in red and white pigment cover the overhang walls above the old cowboy equipment.

A natural spring seeps from the rock at the back of the alcove, creating a tiny green oasis of maidenhair fern and cattail in the red desert. The cowboy artifacts — a wooden bunk, old tin cans, hand tools, and leather equipment — have been left largely in place as found, giving the site an atmospheric quality of recent abandonment rather than ancient history. Two short wooden ladders assist with the sandstone scrambling sections of the loop, which climbs briefly over a slickrock fin for a view of the surrounding Cedar Mesa Sandstone terrain. The loop takes less than an hour and provides one of the most complete cultural history experiences in any national park at this difficulty level.