Canyon Pintado National Historic District Rock Art: White Birds Recreation Site

A cairn found in Cohab Canyon, Capitol Reef National Park.

Frank and Anne's Canyon Country Hiking and Camping Notebook.

Canyon Pintado National Historic District

Campsite

Ancient Ruins
and Rock Art

This page contains a discussion of the rock art found within the Canyon Pintado National Historic District, at the White Birds Recreation 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

White Birds Recreation 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 White Birds Recreation 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:

See American Antiquities Act of 1906.
See Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979.
Archaeological Resources Protection Act Hotline: 800-227-7286.
See Archaeological Site Etiquette

The White Birds panel is high up on a ledge above the broad canyon bottom. The BLM has constructed a stairway so that visitors to the site can get a closer view. It's not a large panel (most of it is shown in the main image at the top of this page), but it does have a few impressive examples of pictographs.

The two "birds" are obvious, but I wonder if they are actually birds. The wings give the impression of rising doves, but the shape of the bodies give the impression of anthropomorphs, though there are no apparent legs. There are also interesting color variations associated with the bodies.

The most striking pictographs on this panel are these two figures. The three colored carrot-shaped figure appears to have fluttering red wings on either side of the white section. There are also slender appendages on either side near the junction of the red and white sections. In addition, there are slender red elements coming from the top of the orange section. There is obviously more to this image than what first meets the eye.

The little white figure with its yellow border and single feather is also intriguing.

Among the smaller images near the lower left of the panel are these white markings. However, the white image in the extreme lower left appears to be a zoomorph; probably a beaver or beaver pelt. And there is also a thin-lined red figure superimposed over the white elements. It's difficult to make out what it might be, but there is the possibility that it is an anthropomorph.

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More Rock Art

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 Monday, July 14, 2008

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