July 25: Dead End at Deadhorse

OK.  Not every effort works out perfectly.

Today we headed to Seven-mile Canyon.  This canyon was used to construct the current road to Deadhorse Point and the northern sector of Canyonlands National Park.  At a later date, we will bore you with landscape photos and Hollywood stories.

(Deadhorse Point was the location for the first half of the recent Capital One female rock climber commercial, for the opening scene of Mission Impossible 2 featuring Tom Cruise rock climbing, and for the final scene of Thelma and Louise.  Actually, the original director’s edition of Thelma and Louise showed the car plunging into the Colorado River beside Deadhorse Point and then concluded with the girls spiritually traveling into the La Sal Mountains along a Spanish Valley backroad.)

Anyway, I had heard of petroglyphs and pictographs on off-road trails along the route leading to Deadhorse Point.  There was one in particular that I had never seen in any of the rock art books or even referred to by specialists.  It is a Barrier Canyon era pictograph (like the Courthouse Wash panels) showing a shaman (female?) holding a spirit being, surrounded by serpents.

This was truly a hot day (104º in the shade) and humid.  Worse, the main trail was all sand and, of course, unshaded.  However, I was carrying a backpack with two gallons of water in it, food (Slim Jims and power bars), rain gear, and first aid supplies.  Our Camelbak water bottles turned out to be a great investment.

We located the panel by using binoculars.

 It was 150-200 feet up the west face of a cliff.  So far as I could tell, it was a singular image, painted in red hematite.

Between us and the pictograph was a field of cryptobiotic soil and a lot of vertical slickrock.  There was no obvious trail, probably because the site is almost unknown.  We used a small gully to avoid disturbing the soil, but the slickrock was formidable.  Once on the second level, we could see no way to get up the remaining 100 feet to the upper ledge where the pictograph is.

I left Janet to rest in the shade of a large rock while I hiked a bit further up.  Using some boulders and my walking stick as braces, I was able to get a very long-range telephoto shot of the image.

It turns out that the shaman appears to have a small snake in her mouth.

 Is she swallowing it?  Or is she the serpent’s vehicle?  Scary.  An encounter with ancient shamanic power.

It was too hot to continue looking for access all the way up to the image.  I know that there is a way there, but will wait for another chance.  And be emotionally better prepared to face her.  One hot image.