The Potash Road Pictograph lie right along the Potash Road west of Moab. The road runs in the narrow margin between the Colorado River and the cliffs. There are turnoffs, but be sure to watch for traffic on the road. https://utahpetrographs.blogspot.com This site is just down the road, I believe, from the site I visited in 2014.
As part of our field trip last weekend we visited a BLM site just off of the DeBinky Wells Road north of Dead Horse Point and Canyonlands near Moab. This is a fairly well-known site, and you can find directions at this url. The site is located in an alcove and contains some pretty impressive Barrier Canyon style pictographs. It's well worth a visit if you are passing by.
This past weekend Yeongmi and I went on a field trip with URARA down in Moab. We only caught the first day, but what sights we saw! My favorite was the very last site of the day, off DeBinky Wells Road, north of Dead Horse Point and the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands. Dennis DeVore led us to the site and it was amazing. Since this site is not well known and unvandalized, I am not posting any specific location information and the photos posted have no GPS information attached.
Most of the Panel in DStretch using the LDS filter
One of the coolest presentations from last week's URARA symposium in Delta was the one by Robert Mark and Evelyn Billo on using photographs to generate 3D models of rock art sites. The technology is closely related to that used with Microsoft's Photosynth program which I wrote about in my blog a few years ago. However, while Photosynth allows you to zoom around and view a site from the point of view of each camera shot, the tools that Mark and Billo were talking about allow you to actually reconstruct the site as a 3D mesh and overlay the information from the photos as a texture using the same technology. This is really cool.
Pictograph Panel on Black Rock Mesa
To test this out, I took a series of photos of the boulder above which we visited on the Monday URARA field trip. I got it from three or four different angles and shot it in close up sections. I then input these images into two programs. 1) Agisoft Photoscan, which is the program that Mark and Billo talked about at the symposium, and 2) Autodesk ReMake, which I found online. Photoscan has a free 30-day trial and seems to generate better results, but it costs $179 for the basic version. ReMake runs the analysis on the cloud and can be much faster, but costs $30 per month once the trial version expires.
Below is a clip of the model that ReMake generated in the form of a quick movie.
I just go back from my first attendance at the Utah Rock Art Research Association (URARA) annual symposium. This year it was held in Delta, Utah. It was one of the funnest experiences I've had in a long time.
This past weekend I took my first field trip with the Utah Rock Art Research Association (URARA) and got to see some of the rock art at Nine Mile Canyon. The trip was every bit as spectacular as I had been lead to believe it would be. The rock art is so extensive there it would take years to see it all, but I did get a good sampling of many of the well-known sites and quite a few of the lesser-known ones as well.
This past Saturday, my wife and I were in Cedar City to see a couple of plays at the Shakespeare Festival. With some free time in the morning, we opted for a trip out to Parowan Gap to see the petroglyphs there. It was worth the trip, though I wish I had brought a real camera. Instead I had to rely on the iPhone for the photos here.
Figure from the panel at Cub Creek in Dinosaur National Monument
In mid-August, I took a trip to Dinosaur National Monument with my two youngest children. We visited three of the 5 well-known rock art sites in the park: Swelter Shelter, Cub Creek and Pool Creek.
Sheep Petroglyphs at Fremont Indian State Park in Utah
Fremont Indian State Park is located alongside I-70 in Sevier County, Utah. The site was discovered in the 1980's when the interstate was constructed in Clear Creek Canyon. This site was the largest collection of Fremont houses at a single site ever discovered in the state of Utah. Sadly, most of these were destroyed in the construction. However there was a great deal of archeological work done and Fremont Indian State Park was created in 1987 to preserve what was left.
Black Dragon Canyon is one of my favorite rock art sites. It's named after a winged figure that early rock art aficionados thought they saw and then outlined with chalk.
"I myself visited the site in person a few years ago," said Phil Senter, an associate professor of biology at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, who was not associated with the study. "There's no pterodactyl there at all. It's a collection of other images."
This has been known for quite a while, but the images they were able to tease out of DStretch (see earlier post here) are stunning.
I visited the U.S. Museum of the American Indian in Washington yesterday morning (April 4, 2015) and ran across this work of art on the third floor that contains lots of the same motifs one finds in Utah rock art.
Panel along the Banks of the Colorado downstream from Moab
Last June I had a visitor in town and took him down to Dead Horse State Park and Canyonlands National Park. We drove back down the Shaffer Trail, past the potash ponds and along the Colorado River.
This week on Tuesday I hiked back up to the boulder field near Johnson's Hollow in Provo Canyon and revisited some of the petroglyphs there. I first visited this site in January 2011 and reported on it last August. I was accompanied by my son, Alan, and my dog, Stretch, the dauchshund. We saw several petroglyphs I have have seen there before. And we found a new boulder I had not seen before.
The "new" boulder
This new boulder is further east and uphill of where I have looked before. I suspect there are a great many more in this area one could find with a little time and patience.
Cave Spring is located in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. This location is one of the few sources of fresh water in the area and was used both by the native Americans and later by cowboys. There are two panels here. The first having a half dozen or so pictographs and some "negative" hand imprints where paint was sprayed on the wall with a hand blocking it. The seconds has many positive handprints like those shown in the photo above.
Newspaper Rock is a Utah State Monument located on State Route 211 in San Juan County, Utah. It is in the upper part of Indian Creek Canyon and very close to the road. The site is similar to that at Rochester Creek in Emery County in that it contains a wide variety of rock art styles that span a vast amount of time.
The petroglyph panel near the golf course in Moab, Utah is quite easily accessible and is literally located right along a paved road in a nice residential area. The figures here are rather iconic of Moab and their reproductions, especially "Moab Man" (on the far left above) can be found on signs and merchandise in the area. The figures are classified as "Formative Era" which generally means Fremont, but Moab was a sort of borderland between the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans (aka Anasazi) during this time and the figures here show influences from both cultures.
The Lone Warrior pictograph is well-named in that this is the only easily visible piece of rock art at this site. The style of the figure is unusual and is not easily classifiable as BSC, Fremont, Ute or Ancestral Puebloan.
The rock art panels in Sego Canyon (aka Thompson Canyon) are some of the best Barrier Canyon Style art in Utah. The ratio of impressiveness to difficulty of access is quite high. There are also some very high quality Fremont figures here too
These rock art panels are easily accessible by car along a paved road. Exit I-70 at the town of Thompson, exit 187, and drive north through the town and up the canyon for about 4.4 miles. There is a parking lot on the left-hand side of the road.
