July 22: Washed Out and Washed Up

We spent 2-3 hours sitting in front of the “Courthouse Wash” pictographs in Moab.

  The problem is that the pictograph panels, which are extraordinary and important, are almost impossible to photograph in natural light.  Either they appear washed out in full sunlight or appear too faint when shaded.  I think professional photographers must shoot them at night using artificial light.

We stayed through the morning and early afternoon, and later returned at sunset, to experiment with various natural light circumstances.  I may try photo shopping the results.  The photographic problems here reflect some of the larger problems with knowing when and how to photograph rock art.  We will return and try again when the weather is less overcast.

We had visited this site before.  It is right outside Moab, before one enters Arches National Park, and requires easy hiking—although Janet confessed that last year she was terrified of falling over the boulders.  Now it looks easy to her.  The panels are high up on a promontory

 that overlooks the confluence of Courthouse Wash, the Colorado River, and the Moab valley interrupting the canyons of the Colorado.  They face the “portal”

 where the Colorado River enters “Canyonlands” National Park—a truly wild canyon area.

Pictographs differ from petroglyphs because they are “painted” with mineral-based pigments, usually reds from the iron oxide-rich soil.

 Sort of like the cave paintings in southern France.  (The distinction is not absolute, as I am discovering petroglyphs that have been painted and still show signs of pigment, even after much weathering.)

Rock art experts (i.e., academics) place these pictographs, and others we will explore, in the earliest period, before the Basketmaker, Anasazi, or Fremont cultures (200 B.C. to 1200 A.D.).  These are archaic cultures (hunters and gatherers) that lived more than 2,000 years ago.  Their pictographs are at least that old.  Their society is called the “Barrier Canyon” culture, named after a famous set of pictographs in Canyonlands National Park in Horseshoe Canyon (aka, Barrier Canyon).  (That will be a future hike.)

I mention that because the “Courthouse Wash” panel outside Moab has been the target of vandalism throughout the last century.  There is the graffiti created by those who want instant fame (and risk federal prosecution if identified).  There are bullet holes

 created by those who clearly think little of native Americans, or do not think at all.  But the worst vandalism occurred in 1980 when someone (deranged?  religious fanatic?) threw bleach and/or solvent on the one-of-a-kind ancient pictographs and destroyed their colors and, in many cases, the figures themselves.

The National Park Service in Canyonlands has tried to preserve what is left, but cannot bring back the original panels, their vibrancy, or their original creative intentionality.

I will share a few of the figures with you,

 including evidence of the desecration.  There are a lot of theories (plausible and implausible) about what the figures “mean.”

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No one really knows.  But Janet and I have some thoughts we may share on another occasion.  We do not simply regard them as “shamanic” images, which is the common view.  We connect them to the canyons themselves.  But more on that at another time.

Later that afternoon we did household chores, especially laundry.