ST. GEORGE, Utah — CEDAR MESA is one of the most sublime and culturally evocative landscapes on Earth. Since 1987, I’ve made more than 60 trips to that outback in southeastern Utah, hiking, camping and backpacking on forays lasting as long as 10 days. Nowhere else in the Southwest can you find unrestored ruins and artifacts left in situ in such prodigal abundance. And though roughly 75,000 enthusiasts visit Cedar Mesa each year, that’s a drop in the bucket compared with the four and a half million who throng the Grand Canyon. By wending my way into the more obscure corners of the labyrinth, I’ve gone days in a row without running into another hiker, and I’ve visited sites that I’m pretty sure very few or even no other Anglos have seen.

Hiking through such slick-rock gorges as Grand Gulch, Fish, Owl and Slickhorn Canyons would immerse the wanderer in breathtaking scenery in its own right, even if those places were devoid of prehistoric human presence. But to stand beneath the dwellings, kivas and granaries of the Ancestral Puebloans, as well as the hogans in which Navajos once lived, and to stare at hallucinatory panels of rock art engraved and painted on the cliffs as long as thousands of years ago, is to plunge into a spiritual communion with the ancients, even if the meanings of those sites and panels lie in the limbo of the lost.

What’s still there may soon be lost, as well. Cedar Mesa embraces tens of thousands of archaeological sites that chronicle a 13,000-year history, from Paleo-Indian times until the late 19th century. Administered by the woefully understaffed federal Bureau of Land Management, the mesa is hammered every year by rampant looting that a small number of rangers are powerless to stop. The plateau and canyons remain, in the words of Josh Ewing, executive director of the group Friends of Cedar Mesa, “undoubtedly the most significant unprotected archaeological area in the United States.”

More ominously, perhaps, the Utah State Legislature has its eye on the roughly 500,000 acres of pinyon and juniper forests and its twisting sandstone canyons.