Sego Canyon

One of my real passions, the one that first got me involved Dirt Brother Bob in the first place, is rock art. Over the past decade and a half I've had the privilege of visiting remotes sites in southeastern Utah, and moving a little further north this year brought me closer to a different style than I've been accustomed to.

One of this is Sego Canyon, one of the more accessible and outstanding collections of varied rock art styles.  Although  most famous for it's Barrier Canyon style "ghosts", there is also a nice collection of Fremont and historic petroglyphs all in the immediate vicinity.

This is the rather large main panel.  Here, for the sake of clarity and and to assuage a degree of personal vanity, let me insert a person against which to judge it's size.

Here I stand closer to the base, though still not immediately at foot of the panel. 

And yet another photograph, taken by our trail boss and my brother, who was kind enough to recognize our relative proximity to this masterpiece and led us to it.  I was hoping that this closer view would reveal some of the subtleties that begin to emerge on closer examination, but this was not to be.   But this is true of almost any large grouping like this one.  You just have to be there, and since you're clearly not there right now, I guess this will just have to do until you get out there to pick out the details for your self. 

I don't have all the pictures taken out there on the western side of the canyon reduced for presentation yet, but here are some more from the eastern side of the canyon.  The canyon itself has seen many uses over the years, including mining for water from further upstream, but this set is from an area inside an old corral.

Although posing with these tall, silent type of red men was enjoyable, I was grateful that I didn't suffer their fate of serving as targets for shooting practice.  Again here you can jsut barely begin to appreciate the increased level of detail that begins to emerge, although the lower portion has suffered considerable degradation from contact either with cattle or the more detrimental lanolin containing wool of sheep, which has the unfortunate ability to really wipe oil based pigments clean. 

This last pictograph is actually around the corner from these, still on the east side of the canyon. The upper image is quite unusual and surely from a different period than the older Barrier Canyon style.  Any hints on the nature of the iconography it displays?

More to come from this Sego Canyon series as I shrink the originals to a webbish size, and this is just one of the sites that I'll be featuring here.