Utah’s 6,000-year-old museum
Deep in a forbidding Utah canyon hangs a collection of powerful, ancient art, said David Kelly in the Los Angeles Times. Last year, my children and I were looking for adventure, so we four-wheeled and hiked into Canyonlands National Park and Horseshoe Canyon, home of numerous “enigmatic” pictographs created by unknown artists more than 6,000 years ago. No one knows the meaning of these wall paintings, but they’re attributed to the pre-Anasazi race called the Archaic people. My son spotted the first pictograph series, set high on a canyon wall. The images were unusual—some insect-like, others human. We crossed a creek to get a close-up look at colorfully painted bison heads, and soon “the pictographs were popping up everywhere.” The unusual art show culminated with a 200-foot-long wall covered with painted figures, many with “haunted, hollow eyes.” It was a spiritual experience, “in the way only a wonderful mystery can be.”
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