Rock art is not an artifact. It is an action still happening.
When I see petroglyphs and pictographs, basic questions come to mind. What do these figures and symbols convey to me now, what did they say to people in their time, and how do they fit with other sites and repeated motifs, stories being told across distances? The entire Colorado Plateau, around 250,000 square miles of mostly exposed rock, is an open book. The questions move on from what am I reading to where am I on the land? How did I get here, and how did they get here? What are the flute players playing? A resplendent person depicted holding a snake by one outstretched arm means what?
– Craig Childs, Tracing Time, Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
Overnight into Tuesday, February 14, 2023, it started to snow. It would continue to snow off and on for the next two days. So Sean and I hunkered down in Moab on Valentine’s Day and then spent the following day exploring the astonishing rock art near town.
On Valentine’s Day, it snowed all day. But there wasn’t any accumulation, so it was delightfully atmospheric without being bothersome.
We slept in, had coffee and muffins in our room, relaxed. Then at 11am we headed out, walking across downtown to Sweet Cravings for a lunch of sandwiches, coffee, and little V-Day cookies.
Afterward, we wandered around Moab, which we hadn’t really done the year before. Of course we went to the legendary Back of Beyond Bookstore, which was just as it should have been with an incredible collection of conservation, nature, and public lands books.
And the “local authors” section is stupid: Terry Tempest Williams, Craig Childs, Edward Abbey.
We checked out a few more shops before heading back to the Radcliffe for the afternoon.
It continued to snow while I did a little work and Sean took a nap.
It had stopped snowing when we stepped out at 6pm for dinner. At Angela and Dan’s suggestion, we headed over to Woody’s Tavern for burgers, tots, and frosty beers.
That night, we relaxed in our room, watched Murder, She Wrote, read. I caught up on notes. Meanwhile, the Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory for Moab and a winter storm warning for Canyonlands National Park.
Next morning, Wednesday, February 15, 2023, I woke at 6am. Downstairs it was quiet, and one of the hotel staff had just come in from shoveling. There wasn’t a lot of accumulation, but it was icy underneath. “It’s a good thing we didn’t get more,” he remarked.
I ordered a coffee and a bran muffin, and then I went back upstairs to get a little work done while Sean slept.
When Sean woke up, we determined how to spend the day. It was still snowing a little bit, and it seemed like Canyonlands was getting the brunt of the storm. So we decided to drive around the outskirts of Moab with the rock art guide, and then in the afternoon maybe head up into Arches National Park.
We headed out at 10:15am. When we got to the Jeep, we discovered a blue rubber duck on the driver’s side door handle. We were absolutely puzzled since it was our first encounter with Duck Duck Jeep. Jeep Ducking was started in Canada in 2020, apparently, by Allison Parliament. The concept is to spread a little happiness by leaving a rubber duck on or near someone’s Jeep Wrangler for them to discover. Since this wintry morning in Utah, we’ve noticed Wranglers with rows of rubber ducks on their dashes. We’ve been ducked elsewhere, and we’ve passed on the ducking.
That day we used the wonderful booklet, Moab Rock Art, Driving Tour of Moab Area Petroglyphs & Pictographs by Janet Lowe as our guide. We had purchased it the year before, but had only seen the panel in Arches National Park near Delicate Arch.
On this morning, we started our rock art tour by heading south to the outskirts of Moab to what is known as the Golf Course Panel. It’s actually across the street from one of the golf course fairways.
The panel’s most famous image is “Moab Man,” a Hisatsinom (Fremont) Petroglyph of a humanoid figure that looks like it has antlers and large earrings. Archaeologists suspect that this sort of humanoid anthromorph with human and animal aspects could indicate someone wearing a ceremonial headdress or perhaps a blending of human and animal qualities.
Many of the petroglyphs on the panel are Hisatsinom, similar humanoid figures with ornamentation. It’s difficult to place the images in time save that they correspond to Hisatsinom culture, so sometime between 300 and 1300 CE.
There are also Ancestral Puebloan Petroglyphs here, as well as contemporary vandalism.
There is a high degree of what feels like whimsy to contemporary eyes. The figure that reads as a happy dog at the lower left in the image above is wonderful. The sort of goat-headed figure at the upper right is also marvelous.
Sean wondered, “How is it still here?”
Our appetites whetted, we consulted the guide and headed to our next set of panels.
We drove back into town and then headed west on Kane Creek Road along the south/southeastern bank of the Colorado River. There are three major rock art sites along this road. When we arrived at the first, which is adjacent to the parking area at the entrance to Moonflower Canyon, a maintenance truck was pumping out the pit toilet. Gross. So we decided to stop at farthest site, Birthing Rock, first and then make our way back to the others. Using the mileage indicator in the guide and the Jeep’s odometer, we drove first on paved road and then on dirt road that began to loop up into a canyon.
Although we weren’t too far from Birthing Rock, we became skittish as the road narrowed. Ahead, snow and ice covered the road. We decided to turn around because of the wintry conditions.
We easily found the next panel, a collection of Ancestral Puebloan petroglyphs centered around Bighorn Sheep, including a wonderful set of sheep tracks.
The panel sits on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, and there is a sign warning against vandalism.
Still, the panel shows two of the most common types of vandalism of ancient rock art: bullet divots and graffiti.
Up the road, we pulled over at a largely ruined panel. Here, also, there was damage from graffiti and bullets.
But here many of the ancient petroglyphs have been obliterated. Violently scraped away. We would see more of this erasure later in the morning.
The settler graffiti on this panel is both recent and antique, with some of the additions dating from the early twentieth century. Layers of history, violence, erasure, firearms, and white supremacy all in one small cliff face near the Colorado River.
We continued on and arrived back at the parking area for Moonflower Canyon.
There is a lot going on in the panel above, with both Hisatsinom and Ancestral Puebloan Petroglyphs (and some vandalism and bullet damage). But the highlight here is the Archaic figure.
This image is roughly 2,000 years old. It is humanoid, although it lacks protruding arms, and has two horns (or rays…or feathers…or we really don’t know) protruding from its head. It visually dominates the panel and all of the other art added centuries, even millennia, later.
It was after 11:30am, so Sean began to look for lunch options while we drove back into town and toward our next site.
We made a quick pitstop at Lions Park on the north end of Moab so I could pee before we continued across the Colorado River to the parking area for Courthouse Wash.
The Courthouse Wash Panel is within Arches National Park, but just barely. It is up on a cliff face above the confluence of Courthouse Wash and the Colorado River, overlooking US-191 north of Moab.
After parking, we walked back toward the river along the bike and pedestrian trail between Moab and the entrance to Arches. The panel viewpoint is 0.8 miles from the parking area.
After crossing the bridge over Courthouse Creek, we stepped off the bike path and into both Courthouse Wash and the National Park.
A few gentle switchbacks led us up toward the panel.
Once we spotted it in the distance, we couldn’t unsee it.
Above an ancient crossing point on the Colorado, the panel boasts Hisatsinom, Ancestral Puebloan, and Ute Petroglyphs and Pictographs. But these are all much more recent than the larger-than-life figures they surround and overlap. These figures are Barrier Canyon-style Archaic Pictographs, possibly 4,000 years old.
In April 1980, someone committed a horrifying act of vandalism, using household cleanser to attempt to literally scour the pictographs off the cliff. The National Park Service removed the residue, but the pictographs can’t be restored. The relatively unaffected images in the far upper right offer a sense of how vibrant the pictographs were before the attempted erasure.
The extreme vandalism of the Courthouse Wash Panel in 1980 echoes 2021 vandalism of Birthing Rock, which we had decided not to attempt to see. In that year, someone wrote “white power” on the panel. It is part of a spate of recent vandalism of rock art, often clearly motivated by bigotry and continued attempts at erasing anyone non-white from a Christian nationalist perversion of the United States.
The vandalism of ancestral rock art and the destruction of sacred sites is directly connected to the yanking back of burgeoning Indigenous stewardship of public lands, particularly the Trump administration’s shameful and illegal gutting of Bears Ears National Monument, literally just around the bend from Courthouse Wash.
The Courthouse Wash panel faces a Springhill Suites and some other developments on US-191 on the northern edge of Moab.
To the south, we could look down into town from this once highly visible rock art site.
Feeling upset, we headed back the way we’d come.
Back in the Jeep, we drove west again along the Colorado, but this time on the opposite bank.
Again we used the guide and checked the odometer to help steer us to sites here along Potash Road.
The first panels were in the dark desert varnish of a sheer cliff above the road.
The figure on the left looks like it has a tail.
These figures appear to be male.
Sean declared it his favorite panel of the day so far.
High enough to have been spared easy vandalism, the panel appeared to blend both Hisatsinom and Ancestral Puebloan images.
One portion of the panel featured twenty-four figures in a row with linked arms, like paper dolls.
We missed the pullout for the next panel, but we kept going, planning to stop on the way back. Instead we pulled into a parking area opposite the same canyon we’d attempted to drive up earlier.
We were at the BLM Poison Spider site, which features both rock art and dinosaur tracks. Neat!
Although the switchbacked trail is short, it was still high and exposed enough to make me a little nervous.
At this site, the petroglyph panels are along the base of the sheerest portion of the cliff face.
Mostly Ancestral Puebloan, they are, well, weird and wonderful.
What is this strange beast?
Is the Bighorn Sheep with no legs at the upper left resting? In the center group, which looks like a hunting scene, is the figure with the bow and arrow a crouching human wearing a pelt as camouflage?
Also along the cliff face, we saw the first of two large boulders with fossilized dinosaur tracks.
The tracks, from roughly 190 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, were made by bipedal theropod dinosaurs.
We walked along the panels of work art.
What is going on here? It’s like two Bighorns are bumping butts.
Or here, where the Bighorns appear to have turned into one creature?
There was another line of paper doll figures here too.
We walked as far as we could along the cliff before turning around.
For some reason, it is the Hisatsinom figure here that has received the brunt of the vandalism.
Heading down, we passed another boulder with dinosaur tracks. These were very clear and very cool.
Also on the way down, my telephoto lens slipped out of my jacket pocket and rolled down the cliff. The lens was fine, but its glass protector shattered. But that’s what it was there for, really. After I picked up the shards, we headed back to the Jeep.
It was already 1:30 and we were both hungry. But we had one more panel we wanted to see on the way back into Moab.
The centerpiece at this final panel of the day was a large Ute Petroglyph of a bear.
The bear is a newer image and, as it defaces older petroglyphs, may represent cultural “vandalism.” There is extensive superimposition of one culture’s petroglyphs and pictographs over another’s throughout the Southwest. There is even evidence to suggest that some images were created progressively. For example, the first culture pecked an anthropomorph, the next added a headdress or collar; another may have added a spear or shield. Archaeologists look at the color of the rock, among other things, to make these subtle determinations.
– Janet Lowe, Moab Rock Art, Driving Tour of Moab Area Petroglyphs & Pictographs
We were very hungry after seeing so much incredible rock art. So we went to The Spoke on Center for a huge lunch of corn chowder, wings, salad, and fish tacos.
Our plan for after lunch was to venture up into Arches National Park, despite the weather, and see what we could see.