BY BRIAN MAFFLY
The San Juan River runs through a broad flood plain a half-mile south of Bluff, the southeastern Utah town that boasts its founding in the year A.D. 650 — a good 12 centuries before the arrival of Mormon settlers.
That's the time Ancestral Puebloan culture took off, when American Indians began crafting dwellings from rock, mud and juniper in the cliffs along the San Juan and tributaries that flow off Cedar Mesa and McCracken Mesa.
While the ancients lived and worked beside this vital water, the modern town is cut off, access blocked by tracts of private land given to homesteaders who settled the valley in the 1880s.
Now local historic preservationists are seeking to tie the town with the river by arranging easements across various private properties to develop an 8-mile network of nonmotorized trails that would run along the San Juan's north bank downstream to the Sand Island recreation site...