Coyote Gulch Pictograph Panel

The Central Figures

The pictograph panel in lower Coyote Gulch is located about half a mile downstream from Coyote Natural Bridge. It is located on the north wall of the canyon at the top of a sandy hill. There is a very clear path running up the hill to the panel.

I have posted all the photos I took here on my rock art webpage.

Most of the images are pictographs painted on the rock, but there is a faint hourglass shapped figure scratched into the rock. Also something that looks like a pair of horns that have been pecked into the rock deeper than the scratching.

The art shows a Fremont influence. At least the light grey-yellow painted figures which are similar to the horned figures found in Fremont rock art. The other figures are more difficult to place, especially for an amatuer like myself. In some cases, like the object we labelled the tennis racquet, the red pigment looks older than the grey. But in the case of what Dave called, "The Chief", the red looks just as recent as the grey.

When we looked around we noticed that someone had piled up some of the stones in the area to look like a low wall. I am skeptical that this is authentic, but the stones may have well been builiding block of earlier structures. We also found two circles that had numerous bits of corn cob, squash rind, bone, and hard flints. One was inside the low wall. The other was in what looked like a fire ring, but some of the rocks in the ring were actually adobe, not stone. Again, I suspect these have not been lying here like this for hundreds of years. Most likely they are objects that hikers have run across and deposited here since they saw earlier hikers had done so. Dave raised an interesting question though, why hasn't somebody just walked off with all this stuff? Perhaps they have, just not all of it. Or do Coyote Gulch hikers have enough civic virtue to only look and not steal? At least two do.

Looking around the shelf where these two circles were (located under a slight overhang to the west of the panel) we noticed little bits of black charcoal mixed in with the sand. Even a casual observer can see that this site was occupied in some form in the past.

In order to find out more about the site I checked out two published articles. One is a paper by Phil R. Geib, entitled "New Evidence for the Antiquity of Fremont Occupation in Glen Canyon, South-central Utah." The other is an anthropological paper from the University Of Utah written in 1959 by James H. Gunnerson, entitled "1957 Excavations, Glen Canyon Area."

Gunnerson reports on excavations at three sites in Coyote Gulch, but the sites are all several miles upstream from the pictograph panel. Geib reports on radiocarbon dating from the richest site there, called the Alvey site, and from four other sites in the Escalante drainage. I have not been able to find any published information on this particular site, so it may not have ever been excavated. Nonetheless, information about the other sites sheds light on who was living in the area and when.

Gieb finds evidence from his radiocarbone dating that the Fremont were well-entrenched in the area, raising corn & squash and using pottery during the period from 200 AD to 900 AD. This date is a bit earlier than previous researchers had hypothesised. The Alvey site consisted of three layers the middle of which corresponds to this time period. The top layer had objects of both Fremont and Anasazi origin mixed together. This indicates that the Anasazi appeared here after the Fremont. The most common dates I have come across for the Anasazi are in the range of 1000 to 1250 AD.

According to Don Montoya, Museum Curator at the Anasazi State Park Museum in Boulder, UT, there is rock art scattered through this general area dating back as far as 5500 BC. So, the figures that are not obviously Fremont could be archaic or Anasazi. Or perhaps of some other orgin altogether.

Bottom line is that the side trip up the sandy hill is well worth the effort. The pictographs are in excellent condition and you can get up fairly close to them to see what they look like.

Dave Spencer at the Panel

I am informed by Dave who was informed by other knowledgable sources named Elliot, that there is another well-known pictograph panel in the Gulch. When we were hiking in I saw a well-worn trail high up the side of the canyon on another sand hill that I suspected might lead to pictographs or a cliff dwelling. Perhaps this is where they are.

I found a photo of a different panel on Flickr. Perhaps this is the other site

Update

I enhanced the contrast on one of the photos and reproduce it below:

It looks to me like there are two more faintly scratched figures here. The "tennis racquet" is painted over the top of one. On closer examination, it may be that it was scratched over the top of the racquet. If fact, it may have been painted, but if so the paint has mostly worn off. The other is just to the right of the central white horned figure. You can make out the horns to the right of its head.
Actually, all the easily visible figures look like they are painted on top of or around older, fainter ones.
Another Update
Here are two photos that show the main figures in the panel. One show where I think there are faint horned hourglass figures. Maybe I'm just seeing things, though.


And I have an opinion from an expert as well. Dr. Renee Barlow from the CEU Prehistory Museum in Price says in an email:

"It is quite beautiful, and does appear to be somewhat impressionistic with elements resembling Fremont figures. I think though, that overall the panel does not look like typical Fremont rock art in this region, so it may be difficult to assign a definitive cultural affiliation. If the rock art were dated, that would help of course."

Report on Hiking Coyote Gulch

Jacob Hamblin Arch from Downstream

The backpacking trip to Coyote Gulch went off without a hitch this week. OK, it went off with only minor hitches.

After much debate, we opted to go in via the trailhead near Chimney Rock, rather than the climb down the slickrock near Jacob Hamblin Arch. This added a couple of miles to the hike in, but the descent was relatively gradual and the scenery was great. It required route finding over the sand and slickrock for about a mile or so from the trailhead into Hurricane Wash, but the entry was easy to spot after cresting a ridge after a half mile. The descent over the slickrock into the wash was a bit round about to avoid potholes and such, but not difficult.

The young men from my church group are planning on doing an overnighter here in June. Dave's son is also thinking about taking his scouts here sometime in the future. So with this in mind I wrote up some thoughts on how one might approach this hike with young men and only one night in the gulch.

We hiked in a little past Jacob Hamblin Arch near the base of the slickrock exit there. The park service has installed a two-seat composting toilet there because it is such a popular site. Many people like to camp there before climbing out along the ridge the next morning. We counted 4-5 different groups in the general area.

Dave brought bratwurst for dinner which he had frozen before the trip and they were nicely thawed by dinner time.

The next day we hiked downstream further with daypacks and the going was much easier. We made it about four miles downstream at a very leisurely pace. The highlights included several beautiful cascades and waterfalls, a natural bridge, a cliffside arch, and a stunning set of pictographs. I will devote a whole post to the pictographs later, but in the meantime you can view all the photos at my website.

The trail was very easy to follow. The only semi-tough spots were a boulder field just upstream of Cliff Arch, and a pair of waterfalls just downstream of Cliff Arch. You need to bypass the later two, but the trail was easy to miss and we ended up above the lower falls with a 15 foot drop or scramble down and no obvious way back up. A group of French hikers came up from below while we were eating lunch there and we just sort of shrugged at each other. We couldn't find a way down and they couldn't find a way up.

We turned around at this point because I was getting tired and Dave was starting to feel blisters on his feet. This turned out to be a good idea because the blisters were more serious than he thought initially.

We hiked out the next morning the way we had come in. The climb out of Hurricane Wash was a beast. We knew the general direction was almost directly due east, but the trailhead is not visible from the wash and you have to take a twisting route up through the slickrock to avoid the really steep spots and the potholes. We did not take a waypoint reading at the trailhead and this turned out to be a big mistake. Instead, we read off the coordinates from the map. These are 37º 24' 59" N and 111º 05' 54" W. However we made a typing error and put in 25' rather than 24'. That turns out to be 1.15 miles north of the trailhead. So after climbing out of the wash we took a heading on the GPS and headed off to the NW rather than due west. This took us to much higher terrain and over some steep sandy ground. I was pretty pooped out by the time we crested the ridge. Dave got there first and said, "Well, if there was a truck out there I would see it for sure and I don't see one." The truck was about a half mile to our SW, however, and about 90 degress off the heading we had been taking. The rest of the way was pretty easy, but we were both exhausted by the time we got back to the truck.

To top everything off, the truck would not start. Everything was totally dead. Its a quirk of the vehicle (since repaired) that the battery connector occasionally comes loose, so you have to pop the hood and jiggle it around to get a good connection. I knew this and wan't too worried, but I think Dave was for at least a little bit.

All in all it was a wonderful trip. The scenery was stunning and the hiking was fun despite the challenges. The pictographs were a very pleasant surprize, much better than expected. More on that later.

Stuart Varney: Obama Wants to Control the Banks

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123879833094588163.html

I worried that this would happen. I hoped it wouldn't. I should have known better.

Why are we letting this happen? Is this what we, collectively, really want? If not, then why do we seem to care so little?

Highlights:

Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.

Think about it: If Rick Wagoner can be fired and compact cars can be mandated, why can't a bank with a vault full of TARP money be told where to lend? And since politics drives this administration, why can't special loans and terms be offered to favored constituents, favored industries, or even favored regions? Our prosperity has never been based on the political allocation of credit -- until now.

Which brings me to the Pay for Performance Act, just passed by the House. This is an outstanding example of class warfare. I'm an Englishman. We invented class warfare, and I know it when I see it. This legislation allows the administration to dictate pay for anyone working in any company that takes a dime of TARP money. This is a whip with which to thrash the unpopular bankers, a tool to advance the Obama administration's goal of controlling the financial system.

Robot Achieves Scientific First

This is really astounding if you stop to think about it. The robot formulated a hypothesis and carried out a series of experiments designed to test that hypothesis resulting in new scientific knowledge. All without any input from his human designers. This is amazing! It's not just manual workers who stand to lose jobs to machines, but we Ph.D.'s may need to start worrying. Fortunately, I do have tenure.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2b97d9a-1f96-11de-a7a5-00144feabdc0.html

Ethics in Government

Today's Shoe Comic