Petroglyphs in Provo Canyon

I went hiking near Johnson's Hole in Provo Canyon with my son, Alan, on Saturday and we finally found the petroglphys there. Back in Fall of 2005, my neighbor, Don Roberts, and I hiked through the same area looking for them, but couldn't find any. I've been through the area again several times, but never stopped to look seriously.


They're carved into several boulder on the hillside to the southeast of Johnson's hole. They look very old, but that could be simply because they are carved into limestone boulders lying out in the open and they have weathered very rapidly.


There are several thousand boulders of various sizes in the area and we found at most 12 with petroglyphs. One is of those was really questionable (#12) , and another was not clear enough to be sure it wasn't natural, but I'm pretty sure the patterns are manmade (#1). The rest were clearly hand-pecked. Generally, the petroglyphs we found were on rust-colored boulders, and not on any of the white limestone boulders. We only checked a small fraction of the boulders there, so we probably missed some others.

Here is a full set of photos on Flickr from Saturday