A cairn found in Cohab Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park. Frank and Anne's Canyon Country Hiking and Camping Notebook.

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Rock art from the Reservoir Site, in Canyon Pintado National Historic District, near Rangely, Colorado. This page contains a discussion of the rock art found within the Canyon Pintado National Historic District, at the Reservoir Site. All photographs are from our our personal collection. If you'd like to see more rock art from this location, or if you'd like to see higher resolution or larger images, send us an e-mail message and we'll see what we can do.
 Rock Art
 
 Reservoir Site

The Canyon Pintado National Historic District is made up of several individual petroglyph and pictograph sites scattered over several miles, both in Canyon Pintado proper, among the canyons along the Dragonfly Road to the west, and east and west of Rangely just off of Highway 64. See our Personal Notes for more details on the Reservoir Site.

See the following pages for more rock art from the Canyon Pintado National Historic District:

For more information on how to preserve and protect these priceless historic treasures:


The Reservoir Site is less impressive than some of the others in this area, but it's still worth seeking out and visiting. We were only able to locate one small panel, with a limited number of petroglyphs. However, the markings here are still intriguing.

The image at the top of this page appears to show three anthropomorphic figures hanging upside down. There is one apparently older figure to the left, accompanied by two lighter, probably more recent, figures to the right (you can see them in detail in the image below). Of course there is a problem with this interpretation, since the figures have more appendages that a human would have, so it's possible that these are zoomorphs of some form.

The image above is a nicely represented typical spiral which may represent a journey from or to somewhere, possibly the underworld. Some believe that inverted anthropomorphic figures represent death, and that spirals represent passage to the underworld. This association of figures might enhance that theory.


As mentioned above, these two examples at first appear to be humans suspended upside down. But the image on the left has that long appendage ending in the three leg-like extensions. So who knows what these represent.

Again, this image at first seemed like squiggles, but then if you imagine that it might be a human figure suspended upside down, it comes more into focus. Of course that supposition has flaws because the figures right arm is not hanging down, like you'd imagine, but ascending upward. And, again, there seem to be too many of what would be the legs.

So ... is this some sort of plant? Or just squiggles.

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All of these photos have been resized and manipulated in Photoshop to give the best representation of the image. Some color distortion is inevitable. If you would like to see higher quality versions of these shots, or if you would like to use these images for any purpose, please contact us and we would be glad to help if we can.

 
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This page was last updated Friday, June 12, 2009
   
 
   
 
A Canyon Country cairn.