For roughly one thousand years, from 300 to 1300 CE, the Hisatsinom people lived across what is now Utah. They left behind distinctive pottery and a distinctive style of rork art. Archaeologists call them the Fremont, named after the river that cuts through Capitol Reef National Park.

On Monday afternoon, February 13, 2023, Sean and I got to visit an extraordinary series of Hisatsinom petroglyph panels along the Fremont River in the heart of Canyonlands National Park. This was our first visit to such sacred sites on a trip that would be full of these encounters.

As we headed back into Capitol Reef National Park after our drive out to Cathedral Valley, it really looked like we were in for some sort of storm.

But incredibly it didn’t rain. Or snow.

We arrived back at the Visitor Center with a little time to spare before the 3pm Ranger Geology Talk.

We also had wifi at the Visitor Center, and Juan sent us a catsitting report. Apparently Elsa was unamused with our being gone.

Ranger Angelina, originally from Miami, gave a great talk to a small group of visitors. In addition to Sean and me, there were some folks from Poland and from Wisconsin. She explained how the Waterpocket Fold, the great hundred-mile long wrinkle in the earth, formed.

The Waterpocket Fold is a classic monocline, a “step-up” in the rock layers. It formed between 50 and 70 million years ago when a major mountain building event in western North America, the Laramide Orogeny, reactivated an ancient buried fault in this region. Movement along the fault caused the west side to shift upwards relative to the east side. The overlying sedimentary layers were draped above the fault and formed a monocline. The rock layers on the west side of the fold have been lifted more than 7,000 feet (2,134 m) higher than the layers on the east.

More recent uplift of the entire Colorado Plateau and the resulting erosion has exposed this fold at the surface within the last 15 to 20 million years. The name “Waterpocket Fold” reflects this ongoing erosion of the rock layers. “Waterpockets” are small depressions that form in many of the sandstone layers as they are eroded by water, and are common throughout the fold at Capitol Reef. Erosion of the tilted rock layers continues today forming colorful cliffs, massive domes, soaring spires, stark monoliths, twisting canyons, and graceful arches.

– National Park Service

What was particularly cool about visiting Capitol Reef National Park last among the five National Parks in Utah was that more layers of earth’s history are exposed here than in any of the others, but many of the layers are ones we had seen elsewhere, at Arches, Canyonlands, Dinosaur. Or they were layers we would see later that year, like the Chinle Formation, visible here and also in Petrified Forest National Park, where it creates the drama of Arizona’s Painted Desert.

After steeping ourselves in geologic time, we were ready to respectfully experience human time.

The Hisatsinom Petroglyphs along the Fremont River are easily accessible via a boardwalk a short way east of the Visitor Center.

In addition to signage, the National Park Service has also installed listening stations to experience oral histories from the Indigenous Nations who lived here in historical times, like the Piute, and their relationship to these Ancestors.

Some of the panels containing rock art had partially fallen away from the cliff face in the centuries since the images were made.

The Hisatsinom were contemporaries of the Ancestral Puebloan people of what is now Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. They also overlapped chronologically with the Hohokam. Sean and I have been privileged to experience these cultures through the art and architecture they created, which is still present in dozens of National Parks and National Monuments. We had memorably encountered the rock art of the Hisatsinom several hundred miles north in Dinosaur National Monument.

As we walked along the boardwalk there was another couple who had some trouble spotting the petroglyphs, so we helped them out. Then when the saw them, they were amazed.

Around the same time (c. 1250-1300 CE) that the Ancestral Puebloans abandoned what is now the Four Corners region to permanently settle in the Pueblo communities in northern New Mexico and Arizona, Hisatsinom cultural artifacts vanish from the archaeological record.

As we finished our walk along the petroglyph panels, it was already 4pm. We had scant time left in Capitol Reef National Park, but the sun hadn’t set yet, so we decided to drive along the Waterpocket Fold and get in one brief hike.