Nine Mile Canyon
We have seen
some amazing rock art in Utah. Horseshoe Canyon in Canyonlands is my favorite, with bigger-than life figures on a giant wall. Crow Canyon
had the most interesting figures on this trip. But Nine Mile Canyon
beats everything we've seen
with the sheer volume of rock art. Nine Mile Canyon is actually
over 40 miles long. Twenty miles of the canyon has rock art scattered all along the route. I doubt that anyone has identified all the rock art panels
in the canyon. I found a cumulative guide on the Internet for all the rock art in Nine Mile Canyon and loaded it on to my iPad. Someone
took the time to search all the blogs, etc. and put all the locations mentioned by one or more writers into a single document. Then, he tried
to revise them so they all used the same starting point for the mileage listing. That must have been no small feat. I only wish he would have
gone one more step and listed the GPS location for each spot.
When we stopped at the first location, a couple from Colorado also stopped, and we started searching the cliffs for rock art. We found the main panel relatively easily, but then they found several more using their binoculars. This happened 2 or 3 more times as we continued down the canyon. I'm sure there were hundreds of minor rock art locations that we never saw in the canyon. We had the sense that with patience and binoculars we might be able to find an example of rock art nearly any place we stopped in Nine Mile Canyon.
After about 4 stops, the Colorado couple went ahead, probably worried that we were going too slow and would miss the best two panels at the end of the canyon. We did pretty well finding the main panels along the canyon. Our favorite panels were at the junction with Harmon Canyon, the panels near the Pig Head Balancing Rock, the Big Daddy Canyon complex, and the Great Hunt. The Great Hunt was the best panel in Nine Mile Canyon and is the most famous.
There were lots of interesting "characters" in the rock art. There was Frog Man, Balloon Man (Bolo Man), The Hostage, Tentacle Man, The Great Warrior, The Cowboy, and The Alien. There were lots of petroglyphs with bighorn sheep, but there were also petroglyphs that included horses, elk, snakes, and bison.
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| The Hostage | Harmon Canyon Panel | The Hunter |
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| Cottonwood Tree Panel | Cottonwood Tree Petroglyphs | Bolo Man |
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| Daddy Canyon Elk | Mickey Mouse Panel | The Cowboy |
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| The Alien | Harmon Canyon Petroglyph | Frog Man |
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| Tentacle Man | Daddy Canyon Complex | The Great Hunt Panel |
By the time we finished shooting The Great Hunt and Big Daddy Canyon complex, the sun had set behind the canyon walls. It took us an hour to drive back out of the canyon, and then two more hours to get back to camp. It was a very long day, with half of it driving to and from Nine Mile Canyon. The day would have been much worse if they hadn't paved the Nine Mile Canyon road. I guess they finished that in the last couple of years, because most descriptions on the Internet described it as a rough dirt road that was impassible when wet.
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