Nine Mile Canyon, Utah - Part 1

After our Arches adventure, we headed north to Nine Mile Canyon to study and photograph the hundreds of petrogylphs found there. We seemed to be the only people in the canyon until we ran into a young adventurer named Adam (extras) who didn't have a map and was glad to hang out with a couple of old ladies for the day. He was living in an old VW van and I related some stories of my hippie days in San Francisco and we swapped some music. So the 3 of us scrambled up rocky cliffs and enjoyed the fantastic ancient art. I use these images in my pendants; so this is a treasure trove to me!
Nine Mile Canyon is actually 70+ miles of backcountry byway. The name comes from john Wesley Powell around 1889, because his cartographer was using a nine-mile transect and the canyon retained the name.
The 55 million year old rocks are formed from old lake sediment after it up-rose and Nine-Mile Creek eventually cut into it creating the canyon.
A succession of peoples and cultures lived in this canyon. The spectacular petroglyphs you see are from the Fremont Culture, who lived here for about a thousand years before they moved off circa 1200AD. The later images are from the Utes . Those are the ones depicting horses.
These images are chipped or picked into the rock, as opposed to pictographs, which are drawn with vegetable stains.
One must be very wary in canyons like this....a sudden downpour like last week can flood this narrow area very quickly. We were lucky this bright, shiny day!