Canyon Pintado National Historic District Rock Art: Waving Hands 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 Waving Hands 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

Waving Hands 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 Waving Hands 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 Waving Hands Site presents an interesting collection of pictographs on two panels on opposite sides of a prominent rock outcrop. There is also a long time span of visitation to this site, since there are the obvious pre-historic examples accompanied by later horse and rider images.

This interesting anthropomorph is about 10 inches tall and is either welcoming the viewer or attempting to frighten visitors away. What at first appears to be a toothy open mouth is really a decorated breast plate. This may be a Kachina figure, or a shaman.

	The images that give the site its name are the most prominent features. The white paint is outlined with red, which may be part of the original work, or, perhaps, was added later. The arm and hand on the left are about life-size.

This little anthropomorph is probably about six inches tall and was off a bit from the main panel. It seems to be of a different style from the majority of the work here. There is a certain appeal in its simplicity and stark contrast against the light colored background stone. If you look closely, there seems to be a bit of a halo around the head area, or, perhaps a later visitor to the site attempted to add a head to the image.

There were also a pair of horse and rider images, one red and one white. It appears that maybe the red horse was created first, and then the white horse was added later, as an attempt to copy the original. The style of the red horse seems much more confident, while there seems to be some hesitation in the markings on the white image.

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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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