What is Comb Wash dispersed camping?
Comb Ridge is a monocline, a single tilted layer of sandstone that stands up like a rooster’s comb for 80 miles from the Abajo Mountains into Arizona, and Comb Wash is the sandy valley on its west side. Where Arch Canyon opens into the wash, 2.5 miles north of UT 95, the BLM has made the long-used camping flat semi-official with a vault toilet, a trail register and an understanding that you use the sites already worn into the cottonwoods and make no new ones. No tables, no water, no trash cans, no fee. At 4,850 feet it is high desert: cold nights, hot days, the red wall of the ridge catching the last light.
Arch Canyon is the reason to stay: a 12-mile box canyon with a perennial creek, Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings in the alcoves, the Arch Canyon ruin near the mouth with pictographs from the Archaic period onward, and three natural arches in the upper reaches. An old Jeep road runs about 8 miles up it, open to high-clearance 4WD and OHVs until the Forest Service boundary; the BLM says it is often impassable from flooding, and most visitors park at the register and walk.
This is Bears Ears, and Bears Ears is contested ground. Designated at 1.35 million acres in 2016, cut in 2017, restored in 2021, it was cut again on July 13, 2026 to 121,096 acres in two units, and the five-tribe Bears Ears Commission was disbanded. Arch Canyon, Mule Canyon and Comb Ridge stay inside the retained Shash Jáa Unit; Cedar Mesa, across the ridge, is mostly out. What you get here is a free, legal, shaded camp at the door of one of the densest archaeological canyons in Utah. What you do not get is water, quiet on a spring holiday, or any certainty that the rules will read the same next year.
How to camp it right
Pay nothing, follow the rules anyway. Free, 14-day limit, no permit as of October 2026; the BLM has said it plans a free Arch Canyon permit, so check with the Monticello Field Office before you go. Camp on disturbed ground only, stay on designated routes, and treat every alcove and wall as the protected site it is.
Get there. I-17 north to Flagstaff, US 89 north to US 160, US 160 east through Tuba City to Kayenta, US 163 north through Monument Valley to Bluff, then US 191 north 22 miles to the UT 95 junction south of Blanding. Go west on UT 95 about 14 miles, through the road cut in Comb Ridge, and a mile later turn right at the BLM sign onto Comb Wash Road; the camping is 2.5 miles up the graded dirt road at the canyon mouth. About 6 hours 45 minutes and 400 miles, the last ten minutes on dirt. Blanding has the last gas, groceries and the Edge of the Cedars museum.
Pick the season. Spring and fall. Summer is 100 degrees and floods; winter is cold but workable for a hardy camper. Spring holiday weekends fill every site by Friday noon.
Water. None. Treat anything from the creek. Bring it all from Blanding, five gallons a person for a long weekend.
Flash floods. The road crosses Comb Wash and the canyon track crosses the creek dozens of times; after a storm you may be stuck for a day or more. Camp above the wash bottom; the flash flood rules apply exactly here.
Archaeology. Camp, cook and relieve yourself well away from any wall or alcove; do not touch rock art; leave artifacts; keep dogs out of sites. Looting here is a federal crime and it still happens. The desert varnish and petroglyphs entry explains why a fingerprint matters.
The hike. Walk Arch Canyon in the morning. The first 2 miles to the ruin and the first big alcoves are easy sand and cobble; the three arches are 6 to 8 miles up and a full day. Mule Canyon’s House on Fire is 15 minutes east on UT 95 and needs a recreation.gov day pass bought the night before, because there is no signal in the wash.
Dogs. Fine under control on BLM land and in the canyon, never in a site.
Skip it if you need water, shade at noon or a guarantee. For a developed campground with water, Nizhoni and Devils Canyon are up the hill toward Monticello, and Dalton Springs is the cheap first-come option in the aspens above town.
The canyon that became the test case
People have lived in Arch Canyon for most of the time people have lived anywhere in the Southwest. Archaic hunters left the oldest pictographs at the canyon mouth; Ancestral Puebloan farmers built the granaries and cliff houses in the alcoves and along the back of Comb Ridge, and left the region by about 1300. The Navajo, Ute and Paiute who came after them knew the ridge by their own names, the Navajo one being Tséyíkʼáán, and used the wash as a route north and south. The first Americans to write it down were the Macomb expedition of 1869 and the Hayden survey of 1874 to 1876, and the ridge and Butler Wash got their English names in 1884. In between, in 1880, the Hole-in-the-Rock party, 230 Mormon pioneers on a 200-mile winter road of their own making, crossed this country to found Bluff on the San Juan.
The ruins stayed quiet for most of a century. What changed Arch Canyon was the Jeep. San Juan County’s photographic record of a vehicle track up the creek begins in 1950, and by 1989 Jeep Jamboree USA was running organized events up it, fording the creek dozens of times past some of the densest archaeology in Utah. The fight started the same year. Conservation groups argued the vehicles were tearing out the streamside vegetation and bringing looters within a short walk of unexcavated sites; the county argued the road predated the 1976 repeal of the mining-era right-of-way law and was theirs to keep open. In 2004 the BLM denied the Jamboree’s permit pending environmental study, and the county sheriff and the commission chairman led the convoy up the canyon anyway. In 2007 the Utah Navajo Commission and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office both asked the BLM to protect the canyon, 24,000 public comments came in, and the agency, which had proposed allowing eight motorized events a year, issued two permits with conditions. An archaeologist hired by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance counted about 100 sites in the canyon; the BLM has never done a thorough survey.
Arch Canyon was a small version of the argument that produced Bears Ears. In July 2015 the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe and Zuni formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and asked for a monument; on December 28, 2016 President Obama proclaimed one at 1,351,849 acres, with a tribal commission in the management. On December 4, 2017 President Trump cut it by 85 percent into two separate units, Indian Creek and Shash Jáa, the second of which wrapped Arch Canyon and Comb Ridge. On October 8, 2021 President Biden restored the full boundary, about 1.36 million acres, and the BLM’s 2025 management plan, after another round of proposals to close the canyon to motors, kept Arch Canyon open to vehicles under a limited-entry permit to be written later, while ending the organized Jeep events for good.
Then it moved again. In June 2026 the Tenth Circuit ruled in the long-running boundary lawsuits, affirming in part and sending the case back, and on July 13, 2026 a new proclamation cut the monument to 121,096 acres in two units and disbanded the five-tribe commission. Arch Canyon, Mule Canyon and Comb Ridge were named as staying inside the retained Shash Jáa Unit; Cedar Mesa and most of the rest were out. The camping flat at the canyon mouth is on BLM land under either map, the vault toilet and the register were there before the monument and will outlast the next proclamation, and the free permit the BLM promised in 2025 had not appeared by October 2026.
What has not changed is the law underneath. The Antiquities Act of 1906 and the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 protect every alcove in the canyon whether or not the word monument applies to the ground around it, and the county, the tribes and the BLM all still want the Jeep question settled. The next version of this guide will probably have a permit number in it.
Why it matters
Comb Wash is where the abstract fight over Bears Ears has a dirt road, a toilet and a creek you can stand in. It explains why the monument was proposed, what a right-of-way claim from the 1950s has to do with a 1,000-year-old granary, and why five tribes spent a decade asking the government to put their own names on the map. For a Scottsdale camper it is also the plainest lesson in the Four Corners: the places worth the seven-hour drive are the ones nobody built a campground at, and the price of them is water you carry and rules you keep without a ranger watching. Bring the water, camp back in the cottonwoods, walk the canyon early, and leave the sherds.