Exploring Horseshoe Canyon

Fall is an especially wonderful time in southern Utah. The weather is mild, the crowds are gone, and the cottonwoods are a brilliant yellow.  I recently spent a week  exploring such well-traveled national parks as Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef, as well as remote, out-of-the-way places where I was all alone.  As usual, I enjoyed the solitary spaces best, but the whole trip was inspiring.  I won't attempt to recount the entire adventure here.  Instead, in my next few blog entries I'll describe some of the highlights, starting with a strenuous hike through Horseshoe Canyon.

Canyonlands National Park is one of the lesser-visited national parks, and Horseshoe Canyon, a detached unit far to the west, is even more remote.  Horseshoe Canyon is famous for its haunting anthropomorphic pictographs, remnants of an ancient civilization known as the Barrier Canyon culture that died out centuries before the arrival of the earliest Anasazi basketmakers.  Some experts estimate the figures in Horseshoe Canyon to be more than five thousand years old. 

From Moab, it's a 4-hour drive: north on Utah 191 to Interstate 70, west on I70 to Utah 24, south on Utah 24 for 24 miles to the Horseshoe Canyon turnoff, then another 25 miles down a dirt road to a dirt parking lot.  Then it's a 700-foot descent and a six-mile hike through soft sand to reach the Great Gallery, the greatest collection of pictographs in all of North America.  Along the way, you pass several other sites nearly as grand.  When I was there I saw only one other hiker the entire day.

The figures themselves are enigmas.  Elongated human forms with no arms or legs stare blankly out from the walls.  Winged humanoid figures look ready to take off in flight.  Spirit-like shapes rise ominously over lesser figures.  What do they mean?  No one knows.  The featureless forms could be bodies wrapped in funeral blankets.  The winged figures and ghostly shapes could be visions conjured up by shamans during vision quests.  But this is only speculation.  No one alive knows for sure.

I spent an entire day hiking the canyon, exploring the rock art panels and trying to picture what it was like to live in this canyon five millennia ago.  The climate was probably more temperate--the earth was still emerging from its last ice age--but the canyon walls were no less steep, the rocks no less angular, than they are today.  And yet, the long-ago inhabitants of this remote canyon probably didn't regret their fate.  Game would have been plentiful.  Water would have run through the canyon year round.  And the environment would have been just as inspiring to them as it is to visitors today.

Next time you're in southern Utah, take a day to visit Horseshoe Canyon.  Bring good hiking boots, a camera, and plenty of water.  As you hike, take your time and look for the many pictographs along the way.  Just remember to only look, not touch.  Let's keep these ancient relics intact for those that follow to admire for another five thousand years.