A fun little pictograph that I visited on a hike during a snowstorm in the San Rafael Swell. Luckily it was under a large overhang where I could get out of the snow and take a few photos.
« Posts tagged fremont
Capitol Reef Anthropomorphs
An amazing lineup of Fremont anthropomorphs along the Fremont River in Capitol Reef National Park. This is a well-known and easy to access site just off of the highway.
Placing the Stars
It took me a little while to finally find these petroglyphs after two different trips searching for them. I was just about to give up again this time when they caught my eye. I wasn’t looking quite high enough to find them originally.
Some believe that this scene depicts Coyote in the act of placing the stars. According to one Hopi creation myth, Old Spider Woman provides Coyote with with a sack filled with stars. After climbing to the top of a mountain he begins to distribute them neatly in the heavens, including creating the well-known constellations. Soon, he grows tired of this work and picks up the bag to throw its contents into the sky. This is the reason why many of the stars are not arranged in an orderly fashion.
Looking at this petroglyph site you can see many dots surrounding the coyote-like figure that could represent the stars and the bag-like object that is held in one of its hands.
Slot Panel
Here’s a large and very interesting petroglyph panel found in a narrow slot between two big boulders. The well-defined anthropomorph and bighorn sheep are pretty cool in their own right, but the very unusual bird figure at the lower left is really interesting. Because of the narrowness of the slot, it was tough to get a photo of this site without a very wide angle lens. To give you an overview of the location of this panel, here’s a photo my friend Marty took of me as I took some photos from above.
Great Hunt Alcove
Here’s a photo of the Great Hunt Panel located in Cottonwood Canyon close to it’s junction with Nine Mile Canyon. This is probably one of the most well-known rock art panels around and still one of my favorites. I really like the perspective of this image and how it shows the overall setting of where this panel is located. I figured I would post a photo from the Nine Mile Canyon area today since that’s where I am right now! Hopefully I get some good new photos to post on the blog.
