Anasazi Indians

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, archeologists and plunderers excavated mummies of dozens of ancient Anasazi Indians buried in caves and rock shelters in southeast Utah and other Four Corners states. Experts have believed that they were mummified naturally by the area's dry climate. But a Peruvian physician-anthropologist says that decades-old photographs and reports of two mummies from Utah and Arizona provide evidence that the Anasazi sometimes mummified their dead intentionally.

The cliffs are the color of a sandstone rainbow. White, beige, light orange and, at the bottom, deep red. They wind through Sand Canyon like a snake. The trail snakes alongside, a pink squiggle across a brickyard. My hiking companions this morning haven't been faithful. The jack rabbit bounded away an hour ago, and the canyon wren hid in a juniper tree, though it left the liquid notes of its descending song. So I approach the huge alcove in the cliffs, and the stone ruins that center it, alone.