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Utah 2002
Day 3 On the third day we hiked down to Horseshoe Canyon. It was a weird way of hiking for me. Where I grew up, hiking consisted in climbing a mountain, having a drink on the summit, and then going down again. This strategy does not work in Utah. It's all inverted. Everything starts from a high-elevation plain, and the sights are down in canyons. Below is the start of our party heading down into the canyon.
We saw strange rock formations on the way. They looked a bit like giant petrified bee hives. For those who don't know: bee hives are the symbol of Utah like the bear is the symbol of California. So my theory is that there were monster bees living in Utah 100 millions of years ago and were torturing the dinosaurs.
When we reached the bottom of the canyon we soon saw the first pictographs. They were painted in "Barrier Canyon" style. This style is believed to date to the Late Archaic period, from 2000 BC to AD 500. During this time, nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers made Horseshoe Canyon their seasonal home. Figures don't have arms or hands for some reasons. I assume that manicure techniques were not very advanced by then and people were too embarrassed to depict their dirty finger nails.
The pictographs were painted way up on the canyon wall. So either those hunters liked to dwell at high places (maybe to be save of the beasts that were wandering around during those archaic times), or the canyon's wash was not as deep as it is now. In any case, it was a bit of a climb to get close to the samples of art.
We continued hiking through the wash, passing fresh-looking cotton wood trees in search for more bodies without arms.
We soon encountered more evidence of early human settlement. The suite of figures included cows and pets, and some even had some adumbrations of arms. All figures had broad shoulders and narrow hips. This contrasts the shape of more contemporary fellows, who tend to have the center of their body mass further down (my two friends in the foreground are rare exceptions from this rule!).
The following shot shows the same wall from a different perspective. Note that the body proportions of the photographer in the lower left corner better represent today's population. Evolution sometimes goes strange ways.
The hike went on and the picture below gives some impression of the sheer cliffs that make up Horseshoe Canyon.
The turning point of our hike was the "Great Gallery", a collection of the most magnificent pictographs and petroglyps (figures etched in the rock with a sharp stone) that the canyon had to offer. Nobody really knows why people created those drawings. They may have had some ceremonial meaning or they were drawn just for fun. By then, television and golf had not been invented yet, and I can well understand if folks were bored and were looking for some creative pastime.
Move your mouse over the picture to see a close-up of the group of pictographs at the very end!
For some reason I like the next photo with the green tree in front of the red wall. Maybe it's the contrast between living things and the seemingly eternal rock, which has seen so many different cultures walking by.
After climbing up the canyon's rim we boarded again our Jeeps and conquered the San Rafael Desert a second time. On the way out we passed Little Flat Top, one of the many buttes that Utah has to offer.
We set up the camp for the night near Goblin Valley. I decided to shave, which turned out to be a nightmare as my three-day-beard was too long to be successfully tackled with a blunt razor blade and cold water. After 30 minutes of desperate struggle it finally turned out OK. We lightened a campfire next to a cliff, sat around in a circle like our ancestors could have done it, made plans for the next day, watched for stars and satellites (there were quite a few up there), looked out for Zodiacal light (which we did not see), and pondered about the sense of life.
Me and Mike Move your mouse over the picture to see the stars over our campfire!
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Last updated: 23 January 2016
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