Here’s a closer look at a small portion of the Shamans Gallery. This part features one of the better preserved sheep pictographs contained in the panel. If you look closely, you can see a fainter figure that the sheep was painted over. There are a lot of layers of paintings at this site, which means it was probably an important place for a long time.
Since I posted a photo yesterday of the left side of the Shamans Gallery, I figured that I would post one from the right side today. That way you can get a nice overview of what most of the panel looks like. I guess this is going to be the Shamans Gallery week, so I’ll be posting some close-ups of interesting areas over the next few days.
Visiting the Shamans Gallery has been very high on my to-do list for a while and it was actually the main reason I planned a trip out to the Arizona Strip this fall. After hiking down into Tuckup Canyon I finally realized that goal when I was face to face with these amazing pictographs. The detail and colors used here is outstanding, and these pictographs are not like anything I have seen before. The big climb back out of the canyon was worth it to visit this site. This photo does not show the complete panel, only the right side of it. I will be posting a few more photos of this panel throughout the week.
This isn’t a great photo, but it’s the best I could do with this very faded panel. I wanted to post a photo of this panel because it is the first example of Grand Canyon Polychrome / Esplanade Style pictographs that I have found. This is not a very well-known panel, but I managed to do enough research before my trip to the Arizona Strip so that we could locate it. It was an exciting find, but a difficult hike! If you look closely at the mostly white figures in this panel, you will notice that there appears to be some fine red detail that is present. There also appears to be red snake-like lines that connect all of the figures in this scene. You might need to click on the image to view a larger size to see these details. It’s very interesting to examine.
I took many photos while exploring Nampaweap, so here’s another section with a bunch of petroglyphs all over the place. There were petroglyphs on many of the boulders in the area so we had to be very careful where we stepped and placed our hands while we explored the area so we didn’t touch or step on any of the petroglyphs.
