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Art Center of the World Circa 300 AD

I’d never been to Eastern Utah and wanted to see the famous rock carvings, Flaming Gorge, and dinosaur bones that Eastern Utah boasts of. It was time for a summer road trip! So we packed the car up, bought maps, filled up the cooler and went on our way.

Nine Mile Canyon is not nine miles long. It is named for the Nine Mile River. It is about a 49 mile drive through the largest concentration of petroglyphs and pictographs in the world. I would highly recommend picking up a guide book at one of the local historical museums or dinosaur museums in the small towns of Eastern Utah like Vernal. The carvings are wonderful to find, but easy to miss. It is a little like “finding Nemo.”

There are an estimated 10,000 rock carvings, or petroglyphs just in Nine Mile Canyon. Pictographs are rock paintings – the artists used pigmentation to stain the rock and create an image. They were made for the most part by the Fremont Indians from as early as 300 AD to about 1200 AD when the civilization disappeared. The pictographs can be seen all over eastern Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Most of what we saw were petroglyphs (where the images are chiseled, or chipped into the rock). The only rock paintings left in Nine Mile Canyon are under an overhang so the paint has been preserved. So, experts deduce that many more of the rock carvings could have had paint over them.

Our fist stop was up the far end of Nine Mile Canyon, Daddy Canyon. We were told it had a large collection of rock carvings. I checked the guest book and a group of 30 had been there a few days ago. I thought, “Well these must not be too hard to find.” We checked the trail map and started up the canyon. I kept my eyes peeled for rock carvings up the 40-foot canyon cliffs. As I walked I thought about these people and wondered how they would ever have been able to draw on rock that far up. It was a hot climb and after about twenty minutes, I still hadn’t seen any carvings. The trail winnowed down to just following the canyon wash.

After about 40 minutes of hiking, I was really frustrated…not a rock carving in site! Were they so hard to see? I then realized that looking at the ground, there could not have been a group of 30 in that canyon a few days ago, and my footprints in the rock and sand were the only ones. I turned around thinking about the note I’d leave in the guest book. You are all LIARS! There are no rock carvings here!!

When I got back to the car I realized that the carvings were right in front of it! Just a few feet above my head! I felt pretty silly. The carvings followed the face of the main canyon. They didn’t go up Daddy Canyon at all. After a good laugh at myself, I went to explore the rock carvings. They were pretty incredible! All kinds of hunting deer or elk, and some alien like images. They didn’t just tell stories, but they had imagination too.

As we were driving along through the canyon it occurred to me that this was the center of the art world circa 2000 years ago, in Utah of all places! We are lucky to still have this rich collection of ancient carvings. Unfortunately, many of them have been desecrated with shotgun holes and graffiti. Some of the graffiti is from the early 1800’s. It makes you wonder if it is desecration or adding to the historical record itself. I guess that peoples’ desire to make their mark for eternity does not die.

Note the bullet hole in the center of this “eagle” figure.

We got back in the car and tried to find more petroglyphs and pictographs down the canyon. We found many of them and began to be quite good and identifying where they might be. The pictures here in this article are just scratching the surface of what is able to be seen. The valley was littered with old homesteaded ranches. It was beautiful. Many archeological finds have been made in the cave dwellings and burial places of the Fremont people. There was a lot of evidence that people still lived here and made good use of the land. There had been farmers in this valley for thousands of years.

Even though the carvings have been well preserved through time. Some have studied the carvings and what they might mean. But for the most part there has not been a lot of research into the carvings. I think that they did have artistic talent and it was employed in story telling and record keeping. I think that embellishment of nature had to do with it too. The carvings are located right where the people lived. Ancient wall paper? It was very inspiring to see the continuum of the human story.

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