San Rafael Swell Rock Art III
Saturday, June 18, 2011
This Saturday I was going to meet my friend Philippe from France at Goblin Valley in the evening before sunset. That gave me all day to do some exploring on my own along the San Rafael Reef. I started out driving south along the Reef to Three Fingers Canyon. I hadn’t been back there in a year or two and wanted to gets some better photos of the petroglyphs.
On my way to Three Fingers Canyon I drove south along the Reef. There were some early morning clouds in the sky that spotlighted the reef in this photo.
The mouth of Three Fingers Canyon.
Looking up at the main panel of petroglyphs in Three Fingers.
Another panel of petroglyphs.
Here’s a few more petroglyphs, but what I like about this photo is how the sandstone kind of resembles the shape of a wave.
The anthropomorphic petroglyph here has the remnants of some paint.
After spending some time exploring the Three Fingers panels, I continued along the Reef so that I could revisit the Ochre Alcove again…..one of my favorite Barrier Canyon Style pictograph panels.
An overview of the main panel of pictographs in the Ochre Alcove.
A closeup of two interesting figures.
Three of the larger anthropomorphs….two of them have lines of dots rising from them…
A closeup of the largest anthropomorph and the horned snake.
Here’s a very small anthropomorph that I missed on my first visit here…..it’s very small and very detailed.
Once I was finished examining this panel closely I finished hiking up the canyon in search of two other rock art panels that are supposed to be in the area…..but I came up empty handed on those. So when I got back to the Jeep I went out in search of another new panel in North Temple Wash…..which I did find!
The new panel I found this trip……very faded.
A closer look at the above panel.
An old car near Temple Mountain.
After looping around Temple Mountain, I returned to the Reef and stopped by the Temple Wash Panel again.
From there I headed over to Hanksville for some dinner and to top off the tank in my Jeep. By the time I arrived back in the Temple Mountain area I finally met up with Philippe. We headed into Goblin Valley in hope of a nice sunset…..but that never happened. We did have a nice time exploring the further reaches of the park, though. Here’s one of the few photos I did take in Goblin Valley.
Once the sun was down, we left the park and found a campsite so we could rest up for our hike on Sunday 🙂
