Nine Mile Canyon | The Artful Rabbit

That's Pam's head and hat and the arrow shows the relative size of a glyph.

In which we discover stage stops, climb cliffs and generally have our minds blown by the surroundings in Nine Mile Canyon Utah….

Lots of shots of pictographs and petroglyphs along with pictures of the valley. Harper is a town that grew up from nothing and went back the same way. The cool thing is that as a stage stop with a boarding house, eating place, post office, ‘hotel’ and store, Butch and Sundance were even visitors here. The old barns still exist and everything else is mostly foundations.

Throughout the canyons there were hallmarks of ranchers and farmers, dead metal, rusting ancient trucks and falling down buildings. The historical peoples built better 100o years ago I’m thinking….

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: A beautiful day in a beautiful place

: So rugged and so beautiful. This butte on the Book Cliffs made me think of a Scottish Castle

: Animal group

: Animal group at a distance

: My ultimate favorite is this astonishing deer

: A bird, I didn’t see many birds on the walls

: Buffalo and a ladder

: A good distance shot of the spider woman and graffiti

: bullet holes, nice image

: this is a cast iron telegraph pole, only way to keep the indians from chopping them down for firewood.

: This group looks likes it walking down a ladder and I have no idea what the the shapes to the right mean

: Wild flowers were out in abundance. Beautiful blue on the riverbank, very full river actually.

: Hikers in Daddy Canyon

: coolest group ever,

: Deer and elk have replaced buffalo and bighorns in the canyons

: four wheeling and four legs in Nine Mile

: Another view of the great hunt

: This group is way up high on the wall, you have to wonder how these were carved

: Pam and Paula look for a photo op ghost town style

: Only the foundation is left these days, evidence of a fire showed what happened.

: Chinked cabin collapsing in on itself

: We think this was the post office because of its construction.

: The town fell apart in the 1920’s but the barbed wire is still going strong. Butch Cassidy and Sundance used to come through here. How cool is that?

: After 1680, ancestral Utes had horses, so any horses were carved after that period

: I love his bow and arrow

: This place had barns and abandoned machinery everywhere. Looked like they just left, even a wreath on the door.

: Sacred bison

: This is the famous great hunt, its beautiful. They think it would have been late fall, the only time herds meet for mating season and rams,ewes and lambs are all in one place.

: Leaving the great hunt, last thing we saw on this day

: These look like the phases of the moon. I wonder what they meant?

: A beautiful place and a beautiful day, except for the damned big stinky trucks

: Pam scrambled up quite a few rocks too. We all did, we couldn’t resist!

: On second thought, this is the book jacket

: The petro hunter

: Sheep girl showing how inhospitable this country is

: When she writes her book on pictographs she should use this as the cover photo.

: And here she is up even higher.

: Yes, you can see how high she climbed for the perfect shot in this one

: yep, mountain goat

: Paula spent the day climbing like a mountain goat.

: These figures were pecked into the stone, primitive but effective.

: Piggy Rock does look like a piggy from one side and it had a nice set of images on the side and up the hill too

: Okay, no movies, but this really looks like a popcorn box

: You have to wonder if the kids were coloring on the walls while the moms ground corn.

: I want to choke this guy with my bare hands. Pictographs are so rare and the ass plastered his misspelled sign across this amazing image. What a dope!

: Grinding holes for corn and grain. We call them metates where I’m from. Hard on the teeth, to eat the ground rock bits?

: Dancing sheep pictographs inside the private, barred, no tresspassing Rasmussen Cave

: These sheep are chipped into a horizontal surface, rare, in the Rasmussen cave entry

: Sheep down very low. chipped from a reclining position perhaps?

: I adore this one. It looks like Von Daniken was here. Spaceship and a ladder. Really?

: Spiderwoman is said to have brought weaving to the native peoples. The bullet holes are courtesy of an idiot with a gun and no self respect

: Neatly stacked rock wall after a thousand years. Somehow I don’t think our leftovers are going to last the same way

: Looks like the folks just left, even a wreath on the door.

: Human leavings abound

: how on earth did the early people farm, carve and live in this valley using these walls for their art gallery?

: desert varnish is the patina that shows up on exposed rocks with time

: The Zig Zag monster and a strange medicene man

Pam was stuck in the back seat for the first part of the trip into 9 Mile, but we spent lots of time outside too!Before we entered the canyon, our fearless blonde with a perfect manicure no less, aired down her own tires. What a woman!

May 28, 2011. Today the Prairie Dogs headed to Nine Mile Canyon, Utah, the world’s longest art gallery. The prairie dog posse, aka Paula, Pam and me, jumped off for Nine Mile in Pam’s jeep. It was exhilarating, astonishing and exhausting and I’d like to go back tomorrow. Guaranteed, you will be sick of this entry before I’m all done. I highly recommend sticking it out to the end though.

Before we entered the canyon, our fearless blonde with a perfect manicure no less, aired down her own tires. What a woman!

This may be one of your last chances to enjoy these petroglyphs. Sadly, massive deposits of natural gas have been discovered on the Tavaputs Plateau, and now gigantic 16 wheelers roll in and out on roads never meant for them as the Bill Barrett Corporation extracts the gas. They are throwing magnesium chloride down to keep the dust down and it is thought the chemicals will destroy the rock art if the dust doesn’t.

The first thing we saw in the canyons was a corral full of unhappy cows, all bawling their heads off. There have been ranchers in the canyons with cows for well over 100 years.

Right now, a big chunk of the canyon is on the radar of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They are the feds who try to to protect America’s most endangered places. Let’s hope the need for the gas doesn’t eclipse our need to preserve these astonishing images.

Photo Op! Me taking a picture of you taking a picture of me. Old sheepherder's cabin in the background behind Pam.

The ranchers who settled there because of the year round access to water destroyed all the signs of the Fremont and Anasazi people who lived in the canyon from AD 950-1250 at best guess. Their irrigation ditches and earthen lodges are long gone but there are still metates (grinding holes), granaries and the amazing petroglyphs and pictographs.

Some are chipped in and a few are painted on, along with the occaisonal white boy graffiti. the Utes were relative late comers and some of my favor petroglyphs were Ute. How do I know? No horses until after 1680, so if it had horsies, it was Ute.

Early idiot leaving his mark on the canyon walls.

The first graffiti from a not-native American was good old Charles Grosbeck back in 1867. I found this guy myself, from 1881. There are over 10,000 images chipped, incised, carved and painted into the sandstone walls at over 1000 sites through the 40 miles of canyons.

Nine Mile Road was built by the black Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th Cavalry of Fort Duchesne, Utah. This was the first major road from Ft Duchesne to Price, Utah. The valley had water, the magic ingredient. Not a lot, but enough for travelers and ranchers to make Nine Mile the main highway through some pretty dry land.

Ute carvings of a hunt. Horses don't show up until after 1680

A moment of definition before we proceed: Petroglyphs are carvings in rock faces that are incised, chipped or abraded. Pictographs are images that are painted on rock faces. Nine Mile has both, but pictographs are much rarer and more fragile.

You can still see traces of the early people in the canyons because their granaries, pit houses and a few shelters are still evident in spots in the canyon. We were so excited to spot a granary way the hell and gone high up on a cliff! We spent an hour trying to puzzle out how they got the corn into it and then back out.