Dry Fork Petroglyphs

The visitor center in Vernal, Utah lists the petroglyphs at the McConkie Ranch in Dry Fork Canyon as a "must-see" site.  The rock art is world renowned and the site has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.   The Sadie McConkie Ranch is private property, but the owners have made the petroglyphs accessible to the public; all they ask is that visitors do not damage the sites, and obey all signs.

Our research told us that nowhere else can you see more petroglyphs in one area that are so easily accessible.  They are located along a 200-foot-high "Navajo Formation" sandstone cliff above the ranch houses and parking lot.  There are trails that take you right up to the rock art, where you can view figures up to 9 feet tall.

These figures are attributed to the Fremont people, who were a pre-Columbian culture that inhabited sites in Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Colorado from 1 AD to 1300 AD. In the Navajo tradition, the Fremont lived "before the flood." The Fremont people inhabited a region adjacent to, and roughly contemporaneously with, the Ancestral Pueblo of Colorado and Arizona, but were distinctly different. Most of the Fremont lived in small single and extended family units comprising villages ranging from two to a dozen pithouse structures, with only a few having been occupied at any one time. Fremont culture declined due to changing climate conditions around 950 AD. The culture moved to the then-marshy areas of northwestern Utah, which sustained them for about another 400 years.   The McConkie Ranch, Dry Fork Canyon, and Vernal, are located in northwestern Utah.

So, today, Labor Day, Monday, September 4, 2017, we drove up Dry Fork Canyon to the McConkie Ranch and visited the petroglyph site, which is in a dramatic setting:

There were many more pictographs, more densely collected and more accessible, than we could have imagined.  Some were fairly primitive in design and seem to represent hunting or similar types of scenes:

There are very simple, non-human representations such as this one, which was part of a group of glyphs that struck us as representing demons or skulls or the like:

We found more than a few spiral petroglyphs, which seem to be common to many cultures' rock art:

This glyph stood out as unique among all that we saw.  On the one hand, it appears to be an arrow stuck in a target.  Yet, viewed another way, it seems almost astronomical in nature.  Other than the spirals, it was the only abstract design we saw.

A whole series of petroglyphs show apparently human figures who are either surrounded by, or encircled at the waist by, large circles.  This relatively primitive design seems to show the figure in a halo- or rainbow-type scene:

No jokes about hula-hoops, please.  There were nearly a dozen representations of people with encircled waists, such as this one --

-- and this more primitive one:

The end of the trail brought us these "twins," who appear to be earlier, more simplistic forms:

We spotted several large groupings of figures.  Some, such as this one, appear to represent powerful or royal figures --

-- because the individual figures are large, appear mature, and have elaborate dress and decorations, such as this figure --

-- and this one:

Here are two powerful-looking figures associated in a larger grouping:

This fellow with red-painted horns might be a warrior --

-- as is his friend, below, who curiously resembles, perhaps, a Spaniard in armor with a sword:

A number of the figure groupings clearly seem to be family groups, with adult-sized and child-sized figures --

-- leading us to wonder if they were intended to represent a family group living at the site, or a group of ancestors or the artist.  It was hard to determine for sure what the intention was, but there was no doubt that these were very personal, human groupings of figures, and they called forth the importance of association among them.

We're sorry to report to Jane and Kim (who assigned us a mission of finding lizard rock art) that we could not find any lizards.  These Fremont petroglyphs included very few animals - perhaps one deer, maybe a bison that had been hunted and killed, and perhaps a bear or wolf.  But the vast majority of the pictures were of sophisticated people in social settings, which we found very unique.

Let the Lizard Mission continue...