March 2016 – The one thing about desert camping is that it can get very dusty when the wind blows. And out in the desert, once the wind picks up, there is little to stop if from howling. A rule of thumb we’ve heard is that if it is windy one day, it will be windy for three days.
During our stay in the Valley of the Gods and Goosenecks State Park region of southeastern Utah the clouds gathered steadily each day, and then the wind pick up. Oh my, how the dust was flying. It was in our eyes and our noses and in everything in our rig. We packed it up and hightailed it out of there to the north as fast as we could.
Of course, every region has their own manifestation of bad weather, and the dusty wind storms in Valley of the Gods morphed into threatening dark storm clouds outside of Monticello.
Dust storms give way to menacing storm clouds as we climb in elevation.
Temps plummeted from 80’s in the desert to the 40’s near Monticello and were rapidly dropping as we climbed in elevation to the pine forests. Storm clouds were gathering overhead and the world suddenly looked very ominous.
We looked around, and suddenly, in unison, we both blurted out: “It looks like it’s gonna snow!”
We laughed at this absurd nortion, but I checked the weather forecast on my laptop anyway. My eyes flew open when I pulled up the forecast for Monticello, Utah.
“It IS gonna snow…in the next hour!!!”
OMG – It’s snowing!
And snow it did. As the skies turned black and the wind picked up and the temperature fell further, we found a place to hide for the night.
What a shock it was to see the snow flying thickly around us. It began to pile up on everything, from the trees and leaves to our bike seats on the bike rack on the trailer to our front door steps.
One small step for an RVer…
The next morning we were in an icy winter wonderland!
Who ordered this? I don’t know, but if you can stop shivering it’s very pretty!
It didn’t last, though. In no time at all the snow melted and we were on our merry way. We had come into the high country of eastern Utah to visit Newspaper Rock, a fabulous rock art panel that appears to be just what its name implies.
Newspaper Rock is an enormous slab of rock covered in natural “desert varnish,” which gives it a dark, smooth surface, perfect for pecking out images. It stands under a natural rock overhang, just like a huge sheltered bulletin board, out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by woods and other rock cliffs.
Newspaper Rock is the Facebook of the Ancients!
The slab is absolutely covered with ancient Indian petroglyphs and rock art.
What a cacophany of conversations!
Apparently, the older art on Newspaper Rock is attributed to ancient Puebloan Indians who lived in the area for 1,600 years, from 100 B.C. to 1540 A.D. The more recent rock art on the panel is thought to have been created by the ancestors of the Ute people who still live in the area.
If you look closely, there are all kinds of crazy and fun images here.
We were mesmerized by all the different images. They are packed in tightly, with animals and odd looking creatures and images of hands and feet and geometric shapes all crammed together. There’s barely an open inch anywhere on the panel.
Another woman and I excitedly pointed out various images and even possible stories to each other. There was the weird snake charmer guy who wore a fancy horned headdress and fringe leggings and had a very curvy snake crossing right over his neck. All around him were frolicking horned animals, bison, a four toed foot and another guy with a horned headdress.
With horns on his head and fringe on his legs, this guy has a snake winding across him!
In another area there was a very clear image of a hunter shooting an elk or a deer. He had a bow and arrow and the animal had a huge rack of antlers on its head.
Right above this image there were two odd looking space alien creatures. Each had horns, of two different types, and one had four fingers on each hand while the other had only three. Their bodies (or clothes) were very boxy and they had impossibly short legs with no feet.
Hmmm…
Around them were images of feet with only four toes as well as a spoked circle that looked like a wagon wheel.
A hunter on horseback aims at an elk, but who are those chunky guys with horns on their heads?
I find this three, four and five finger and toe thing fascinating. Some rock art depicts the modern day number of human fingers and toes and some just doesn’t. I doubt these people had trouble counting. Scientists working with African Grey parrots have proven they can count to seven very easily. I think there must have been another reason they omitted the toes and fingers — but what was it?
The amazing thing about petroglyphs like these is that they are pecked out of the rock. It isn’t easy to peck this rock. All over the American Southwest there is rock art that has been vandalized with graffiti in the last 200 years, and none of the graffiti comes close to the quality of the original rock art.
In another part of the panel four horned animals are marching in a row. Three are alike, but the one behind them is bigger and looks like it might have been created at a different time. They look a little like Santa’s reindeers!
Next to them is a flying squirrel caught mid-flight. I discovered Northern Flying Squirrels can be found in the conifer forests in Utah, so there he is on the rock art panel!
A deer track and then a line of deer like Rudolph, Dasher, Prancer and Vixen.
Graffiti in the upper left area barely penetrates the “desert varnish” of the rock.
Two other images of flying squirrels are prominant on this panel. One has a Superman S on him and the other has three fingers on each hand!
I imagine the flying squirrel had significance to the ancient people who pecked these images on the rocks. I couldn’t find any Ute or western Indian references to flying squirrels, but several eastern Indian tribes have flying squirrels in their folklore.
Beneath them is the ever-present foot — with 5 toes.
Flying squirrels, one with a Superman S on his chest and the other with 3 fingers on his little hands.
Hands and feet are everywhere on this panel of rock art petroglyphs, and in one section it is a veritable track of two people wallking up the rock, a larger person on the left and a smaller person on the right. Some have four toes, some have five and a Very Large Person to their left sometimes has six!
A graphic artist or characature style hand outline also appears above some feet.
Tracking the human race with a bigger person and a smaller person together and a Very Big Person to the left.
What about that cool hand?!
Nearby there are two very cute and small deer, each with a very elaborate pair of antlers on his head.
Below them is a bison that has the same outline styling as the hand in the previous image.
A slick bison outline and two deer with very intricate and mature antlers
Bison are very popular on the Newspaper Rock art panel. One image near the bottom of the panel shows a hunter on horseback with a bison. This image is in the lighter color that the Bureau of Land Management says is more recent rock art dating to some time after 1500 AD.
Buffalo roamed all over the North American continent for thousands of years, and many Indian tribes were totally dependent on them.
In 1840 there were 60 million free roaming bison thundering across America. By 1886, 46 years later, there were fewer than 100. They all died at the hands of hunters who were encouraged by the US Army, as they knew the extermination of the buffalo would be the end of the Indians. Buffalo hide also became more popular than cowhide in the eastern states and in Europe, and an average hide hunter could kill 60 bison in a day.
Buffalo hunting was essential to the Indians.
One bison is depicted with cloven hooves, and it’s little details like these that make these images resemble children’s drawings where one feature or another is drawn with careful detail at the expense of other details that sometimes go missing all together.
Along with bison, those animals with the curved horns are really popular images at Newspaper Rock. They are commonly referred to as Big Horn Sheep, but as I noted in another post about rock art in Arizona’s Saguaro National Park, the horns don’t resemble big horn sheep horns at all. Oh well. They are a mystery bovine!!
There is also a creature with a wide tail, perhaps a beaver, and animal which was once abundant throughout Utah.
This buffalo has cloven hooves, and is that a beaver near him, or something else?
There is also a very cool bird with a long beak standing near a horned animal and a very small person.
A very birdlike bird, a horned bovine and a small person here.
Some of the imagery is geometric and some is, well, who knows what it is. There’s also a difference in pecking skill when it comes to creating these images on the rock panel.
Some images are obvious while others a little obscure.
Down near the grass there’s an intriguing double sun that appears to have something inside it.
A double sun. There is something wonderfully mystical about this.
I loved studying all these crazy images. What do they mean and why were they on this particular rock? There are millions of square feet of smooth flat rock walls covered in desert varnish throughout Utah where there are no petroglyphs. And then there’s a place like this that is packed to the gills with images from different people of different eras.
A newspaper indeed!
One of my favorite images was one I spotted just before leaving. It is a ladder with three fingered hands at the top. What the heck?! Nearby is a guy with his three fingered hands in the air. He sports a tail and horns.
There are also some deer tracks marching right throught the image from bottom to top, and a doodle that looks like a flying saucer or satellite.
A ladder with hands, some bizarre shapes, a few feet, and deer tracks running through it all.
In the bottom right is a very elaborate paw print, complete with claws. There are an aweful lot of toes on that paw. Maybe it’s a flower!
Newspaper Rock is a fantastic roadside stop for RVers and other travelers heading into the southern Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. It is right on the way in to the National Park, and it is without doubt the best rock art we’ve seen anywhere.
When we were there after a snowstorm in late March there was hardly anyone there because it was absolutely freezing. But I imagine in warmer seasons the place can get insane because the parking lot is not very big and there are signs up and down the sides of the road before and after the site saying, “No Parking.”
Note: Newspaper Rock is within the boundaries of the 3,000 square mile parcel of land that the Navajo Indians and 25 other tribes have asked the public land agencies to convert into Bears Ears National Monument. It is currently a State Historical Monument managed by the BLM. More info at this link.
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More info:
- Newspaper Rock – BLM Info
- Where the Buffalo Roamed – An essay explaining what happened to the buffalo
- Location of Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument in Utah – Google Maps
Related posts from our travels about the Rock Art of the Ancients:
- Fabulous petroglyphs at Dinosaur National Monument
- Monte Alban – Rock carvings, pyramids and more from the Maya near Oaxaca in Mexico
- Petroglyphs at Saguaro National Park in Arizona
- Yaxchilan – Glyphs carved in stone and frescos painted on pyramid walls tell the Mayan history
- Petroglyphs at stunning Valley of Fire in Nevada
- Pictographs, Petroglyphs and Dinosaur Footprints in Utah’s San Rafael Swell
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Interesting that the six toed petroglyphs are so much bigger. According to Indian folklore of many tribes, giants lived in the lands along with the Indians. These giants were malevolent and had six toes and six fingers. One reason Indians raised a hand to each other in greeting, was to count how many fingers (don’t know if this is true or not) a stranger possessed.
It’s interesting to note that the Nephalim in the bible (giants such as Goliath and Anak) were also said to possess six toes and fingers.
That is fascinating, Andy. I had no idea that either the Bible or Indian folklore referenced 6 toed giants. How cool!!