Randy Langstraat

Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a Utah Life series on ancient rock art. The first story about southeast Utah rock art appeared in the November/December 2022 issue.

Twelve-year-old  Kevin T. Jones rode with his National Park Service ranger dad James along a dusty two-track road on the Utah-Colorado border in Dinosaur National Park. Just across the state line in Colorado, the car stopped for an encounter that would enchant Kevin for the rest of his life.

After that encounter, Kevin would look forever more at rock art and see that it is as open to interpretation as any art from any era in any other culture. That’s especially true of the mysterious, decapitated body and crawling lizard rock art of northeastern Utah.

Kevin remembers that it was a warm day in Dinosaur all those years ago, and that he was wearing high-top Chucks – Converse Chuck Taylors – a T-shirt and Levis. He scrambled up to the foot of a cliff to get a better view of a canyon as it opened along the Green River.

That’s when he noticed, three or four feet from him, the etching of a person, only about the size of Kevin’s hand. The person looked like a hunter holding a bow-and-arrow, and from the arrow a slender, meandering line led to what appeared to be a bighorn sheep. The image mesmerized Kevin.

“I felt drawn to it and enveloped by it, moved by it,” Kevin said. “I have described the feeling as like entering hyperspace. When I look at rock art, I lose sight of what’s around me.”

Kevin grew up living in national parks with his dad, including Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Blue Ridge Parkway and Badlands, but he would never forget standing where rock artists had stood 1,000 or 2,000 years earlier, carving into stone images of their lives and imaginations that would endure for centuries.

Kevin served 17 years as Utah state archaeologist. As state archaeologist, he worked with State Senator David Hinkins and others in 2017 to get Native American rock art named as Utah’s State Works of Art. It is only fitting for a state that takes its name from the Ute tribe, which inhabited much of the region before settlers drove them from their traditional lands.

Kevin’s dad is now 101 and living in Moab. He has watched his son’s career blossom to include authoring the book Standing on the Walls of Time: Ancient Art of Utah’s Cliffs and Canyons, published in 2019 by The University of Utah Press.

What Kevin understood as a 12-year-old, and still does today, is that rock art raises more questions than it answers:

Did the artist who etched the hunter Kevin saw record an event that happened nearby – a hunt that killed a bighorn sheep? Or was the artwork aspirational? Did the artist hope to kill a bighorn sheep? Or was it allegorical, depicting an event that took place in a dream, or a traditional story, or in a song or a religious teaching?

The difficulty of interpreting what rock artists intended is that there is no record of it. There are no captions accompanying their work. Archaeologists cannot dig up their stories. They cannot dig up beliefs. Their homes, tools, or bones offer no clues.

 The living do not offer much help either. Kevin has visited with elders from regional tribes, and they pointed out symbols in rock art they recognized as being similar to ones they use to represent cultural elements, such as clans, human and animal figures that may depict elements of traditional teachings, and physical features such as mountains and streams.

Kevin cautions that native people may be reluctant to divulge the significance of the symbols to non-natives for a variety of reasons. And many of the elements in rock art date to the deep past, before the ancestors of the modern regional tribes arrived in the area.

“We will always be wrong. Always,” Kevin says. “Even in trying to show that a figure has an astronomically significant placement, we are imposing our own way of thinking on ancient works, and we are likely to be wrong.”

If that doesn’t help, Kevin suggests thinking of viewing the Sistine Chapel in Rome – with its hundreds of images depicting humans and angels in many flowing poses and activities, flying, toiling, suffering – without knowing the first thing about Catholicism.

So don’t stress over your interpretation of rock art, Kevin says. Don’t worry that whatever you think you see, it’s likely within the limits of your experience, and might be related in no way to the ancients who drew it, other than that the artist was human.

And that’s Kevin’s ultimate point. All artists are human, and their work is subject to interpretation: Michelangelo’s sculptures, Banksy’s graffiti, Bob Dylan’s lyrics, J.M.W. Turner’s impressionism.

Artists give viewers the freedom to imagine what they see; there is no right or wrong answer. Would ancient artists be any different? That freedom allows for people to choose imagination of tradition.


Randy Langstraat

Much of the rock art in northeastern Utah is considered the product of the so-called Fremont people, a moccasin-wearing, sometimes nomadic people who farmed corn, built structures to store it, hunted, made pottery. They resided in much of what is now known as Utah approximately A.D. 1-1300. Archaeologists named them for the Fremont River in central Utah.

Likewise, some rock art in northeast Utah bears names given by modern archaeologists. What Utah likes to say is the world’s largest art gallery, Nine Mile Canyon, is actually a 46-mile display of hundreds upon hundreds of Fremont and other rock art. The canyon is an 81-mile drive east of Price.

One famous panel of rock art in Nine Mile is Family Panel. Did the Fremont people consider family a unit of society? That’s a good guess.

Another Nine Mile Panel is called Backpack. Did the Fremonts make and wear backpacks?

“We really don’t know,” Kevin says. “As people, we do our best to interpret things we may not understand.”

McConkie Ranch is a privately owned ranch in Dry Fork Canyon 19 miles northwest of Vernal. Its owners protect their petroglyphs in ways that unattended rock art on public land often isn’t. They suggest a $5 donation per vehicle.

McConkie Ranch petroglyphs draw hikers to its Three Kings Trail, a mile-long round-trip hike that is safe for families. Panels include Trophy Head, a picture about what might have taken place here – though there are no skeletal remains below the panel.

Less haunting images include a romantic panel now called The Couple, and The Clock. The humans portrayed on the walls above the ranch are typical of the Fremont style, with exaggerated features – broad shoulders, narrow waist – seeming to form a trapezoid.

That gives rise to all kinds of speculation: Where these especially fit males, or males who wanted to look bigger, more puffed up, than they were in real life? Or some other nonhuman or subhuman species?

Ask questions, speculate, fantasize, wave your arms, point your finger, but don’t touch. Federal law protects all such artifacts.


Witold Skrypczak/Alamy

McKee Spring, site of more Fremont-style trapezoidal people, is an 18-mile drive on the unpaved Island Park Road from the Quarry Visitor Center in Dinosaur National Monument. The road is impassable for most vehicles when muddy.

At the cliffs bearing petroglyphs, look for a short hiking trail that splits into a loop. A panel of concentric circles may have been used as a solar calendar. The trophy head theme shows up here, too, with a wife and child joining in the panel. The art seems to be explicit in other ways, too.

Nearby boat launches along the Green River in Island Park and Rainbow Park ensure that “river rats” add to the crowds at McKee Spring. The National Park Service suggests a visit to the much quieter McConkie Ranch instead.

Cub Creek Lizards Trail, 15 miles east of Vernal, leads visitors up a quarter-mile trail to a sandstone cliff with 5-foot-long lizard petroglyphs. The National Park Service dates the etchings back a thousand years, scratched and chiseled by ancestral, indigenous people.

Or were the artists Lizard people from another planet? That’s your call, and no one else’s.