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This page contains a discussion of the rock art found within Canyonlands National Park, in the Needles District. 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. |
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| Rock Art |
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| Needles District |
| There are several areas within the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park where there are good examples of rock art. Everything we've seen in this part of the Park are pictographs, and there seem to be a great many hand print type images.
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| This group of hand print pictographs is from the Cave Springs area, at Map Coordinates (NAD83): 38 9.391 N; 109 45.233 W; at an elevation of 4,935 feet. This area has an old cowboy camp, with displays for tourists to check out how those hardy desert dwellers made their daily lives a bit more comfortable. However, under the cover of the same "caves" or alcoves, there are many good examples of native American rock art. This panel was one of the more colorful displays. |
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| This panel is from the Peekaboo Springs area (see details with the third photo). It not only shows the use of a different set of colored pigments (all found in the local area), but it also demonstrates a couple of different hand print styles. There are the deep red swirled style hand prints, near the top of the image, and similar to those in the photo above, but then there are also samples of the "blown" hand print, where the artist took paint into their mouths and blew it around the edges of their hand, thus making the silhouette type image. |
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| This third panel is from the Peekaboo Springs area, close to Map Coordinates (NAD83): ~ 38 6.91 N; 109 45.329 W; at an elevation of 5,056 feet. There is about a 50 foot surface covered with a variety of pictographs, including these unusual images. Again, these are painted on, and we have not seen this white paint in too many other locations. The white dots seem to be some sort of counting record, but usually we've seen that type of thing as a petroglyph. Also, if you look closely at the left round figure, and focus on the background above it, a faded red image starts to appear. There is a human sized pictograph painted there, probably from an earlier desert dwelling culture. It is very ghostly, and we didn't notice it at first when we were exploring this panel. Then, suddenly, there it was, peering from the depths of the past. |
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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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