If you're looking for an inexpensive trip that gets you into beautiful backcountry with a guide and if you're willing to give back a little work for the privilege, consider a volunteer wilderness trip.

Section: Smart Savings

I recently returned from a week in southeastern Utah's Cedar Mesa, a high, lonely desert plateau dissected by dozens of sandstone canyons and dotted with cliff dwelling ruins and other secrets of an ancient people.

For several hours each day, the nine-person group I was in hacked brush, widened trails, piled limbs and rocks to keep hikers from wandering off, pounded in signs to protect archeological ruins and installed wooden steps on steep paths -- all surrounded by the beauty and silence of a wilderness under the protection of the federal Bureau of Land Management.

In return, veteran BLM ranger Scott Edwards showed us ruins and rock art and other remnants of a fascinating culture we would never have seen otherwise.

Each of us paid $200 to cover a week’s worth of food and logistics, which were arranged by Dave Pacheco, the founder of Utah Backcountry Volunteers. In the past two years Pacheco has organized a couple dozen trips like this one to provide trail maintenance and do other projects in Utah's national parks, national forests and BLM lands.

He is now folding his organization into the larger, national, Wilderness Volunteers, which operates similar projects throughout the United States.

For this trip, we camped on sandstone slickrock miles from the nearest town of Blanding, Utah, sleeping in tents and eating meals around a campfire, showering occasionally with water heated in plastic bags set out in the September sun.

With good humor and experienced direction Pacheco did the organizing and the cooking -- breakfasts of eggs and potatoes, dinners of pasta with pesto, peanut pad thai with tofu, chicken noodle soup. But everybody joined in the chores -- chopping vegetables, washing dishes, digging the latrine.

The atmosphere in camp was relaxed and full of camaraderie among strangers who ranged in age from a college freshman to a recently retired couple. We picked cactus and yucca fruits one night for appetizers; we waited patiently for a glowing full moon to rise into the evening sky, then watched it set the next morning before breakfast. We shared moleskin for blisters on our feet and beer at the end of a hot day.

Indeed, the work was hot and dusty at times but not killing. We chopped back sage and rabbitbrush with hoes and loppers; we sawed the occasional overhanging cottonwood limb. But in a surrounding like Cedar Mesa, physical labor is rewarding. We hiked miles into some of the most picturesque canyons you can imagine, sandstone walls rising hundreds of feet and hiding cliff dwelling ruins in many nooks and crannies.

And when Edwards gave the word, we set aside our tools and climbed up into ruins he pointed out, often with the encouraging words, "There's even better ones up ahead."

We saw cliff dwellings set high in sheer walls of sandstone, accessible only by precarious steps carved in the stone or by ladders. We looked up close at rock art pecked into the stone more than 1,500 years ago -- strange human shapes with bird heads, flute players, zigzags, bighorn sheep and many more.

Cedar Mesa is a land habituated for thousands of years by people that at first hunted and gathered and later farmed. These Ancient Puebloans, also known as Anasazi, left a legacy of architecture, pottery, art and more when they suddenly left the Four Corners region where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet.

By the end of the week, our little group of workers was enriched by friendship and in knowledge -- both of having helped maintain a land that is seeing increasing hiker traffic and of the ancient ones who came centuries before us.