Photo Gallery: Barrier Canyon Style Pictographs
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My favorite hiking trails involve archaeology. I loved tracing ancient Roman history while hiking across England on the Hadrian’s Wall trail, finding wedge tombs and Ogham stones on the Kerry Way in Ireland, a Bronze Age stone circle in Wales, and Ancestral Puebloan ruins and Chacoan great houses throughout the Four Corners. I’ve also been lucky enough to find some incredibly preserved examples of Native American petroglyphs and pictographs throughout Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.
Typically I write more involved hiking trail reports, or I’ll combine multiple hikes into a roundup “best of” list. In this case, I’m so floored by these Barrier Canyon style pictographs in the canyonlands of Southern Utah that adding any of my own words to shape a story out of them feels embarrassing and narcissistic. I’d like to let them speak for themselves, and let you ponder as to what you think this rock art might have meant to the people who made it. This is also an excuse for me to post slightly higher resolution photos than usual so you can admire the ancient artistry, as I normally compress photos for wordier articles.
I will add a few historical notes for reference. Most of the pictographs and petroglyphs I’ve seen in the Southwest are from the Fremont Culture or Ancestral Puebloans and date to 1100-1300AD. Some are more recent, like those in the Paiute Cave. Contrastingly, the Barrier Canyon style pictographs below, which often depict anthropomorphic characters that have no arms or legs, are thought to date to 2000BC-500AD or possibly even earlier. Clay figurines found nearby were able to be dated back 7000 years – twice as old as the pyramids! This prehistoric rock art style is quite ghostly, don’t you think?
“Beware, traveler. You are approaching the land of the horned gods…”
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
I had the canyon all to myself. It took driving a long dirt road for hours, which did quite the number on my truck bed setup, and hiking 7 miles roundtrip (my tracker called it 8 miles) while worried about a mountain lion, but seeing these haunting Barrier Canyon style pictographs up close was well worth the effort. Some of them were even life-size! I’d love to start posting more photo galleries like this; a picture speaks a thousand words. That’s something the artists who created the pictographs knew well.
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