We did laundry today, got the Jeep’s oil changed, and went to library to work on setting up the blog and begin sorting through photos and field notes.
I did a little reading on Moab history and culture in the “historical” era.
As I mentioned earlier, Moab is in Grand County, UT. Geographically, Grand County occupies about 3,700 sq. mi. of land. That is more than four times as large as Berks County in Pennsylvania. But only 13 sq. miles of that territory is water (.35%).
Meanwhile, the population of Grand County is less than 9,000. That is smaller than the town of Wyomissing outside Reading. Moab has 5,000 of those residents, not including the Spanish Valley--a “suburb” of Moab where we are camping.
According to the official Grand County website, the third largest city in Grand County is Cisco (seen in the film Thelma and Louise) which is a ghost town. It is. We were there last year. This year we had occasion to drive 30 miles north of Moab to another ghost town, Thompson Springs, a stop on Interstate 70. It used to be an Amtrak stop in the middle of nowhere (the “Book Cliffs”). There were a handful of trailers and an abandoned motel, café, and “Souvenir Gift Shop.” Official population: 39.
I thought that might help give perspective to the notion of isolation. There were many more people living in southern Utah during pre-historic times than today. They knew how to adapt to the environment, that is, before overgrazing, mining, and drilling remade the landscape in our own image.
I mention this because one of my operating premises is that the prehistoric petroglyphs should be studied in terms of the terrain and geography of each site. I do not believe they are a set of symbolic writings that can simply be decoded. No universal interpretation is possible. One has to know how each group lived and how ancient Americans in this type of landscape related to it. The landscape is what provided meaning, in my opinion.
This means that we often spend 2 or more hours at a single site, in some cases after hiking and exploring 3 to 4 hours to find or get to the site. In several instances, we have had to return a second time (as we did with the Owl petroglyph) because we could not find a trail up the canyon wall to get to it. (Yes, we are careful.)
Yesterday, we climbed up the Moab Rim
to the west of our campsite, about 500 feet in elevation straight up over boulders.
On the top is a two-mile valley that is an old Anasazi trail through the “Behind the Rocks” wilderness of slot canyons.
Last year we could not find the petroglyphs that we were told were up behind the Moab Rim.
We were surrounded on two sides by hundred foot cliff-faces that stretched for four miles. We finally found a one-foot wide trail through the cyrptobiotic soil leading to a large rock formation that we had to climb. There we found the panels, spread about 600 yards along the face of the cliff. The row of Bighorn sheep was especially impressive.
Again, the detail of the pecking was noteworthy.
Two figures to the side seem to be fighting.
Other figures seem to be dancing or in a trance (shamans?).
We will probably return when it is cooler, now that we know the location. We may find additional panels further along the cliff.
By the way, cryptobiotic soil
is desert ground covered by living organisms (lichens, fungi, molds, etc.) that help hold in nutrients and moisture. It takes 150-200 years for the soil to mature (so they say). I was particularly fascinated by the “gardens” of cryptobiotic soil growing in the depressions of the slickrock on the Moab Rim.
It is a sin to step on cryptobiotic soil. Bumper stickers in Moab read: “Don’t break the crust.” But it does make exploration of this area more difficult.
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