Nine Mile Canyon... Plus about 31...

Don't be fooled.

The canyon, I was warned, is actually somewhere in the fifties. Just to get to the main attraction is about forty.

So Nine Mile Canyon follows Nine Mile Creek. It has been inhabited on and off for thousands of years by Native Americans, white settlers, ranchers, and soldiers. The road was then built to follow the creek, and recently paved over (without anyone bothering to remove the signs stating that its a dirt road.)


Partially it was paved to help with the heavy truck traffic, but it also meant that less dirt was being kicked up in the air, which damaged the petroglyphs.

Yes. More petroglyphs. But these are really famous.

The canyon is known as the world's longest art gallery. And as an added bonus, this was the first time that I have seen petroglyphs/pictographs and actually recognized them as something more than child's drawings. I know that sounds bad, but some of them seem so simple, such basic shapes. And yet this time around, it didn't seem so distantly symbolic. This time I could imagine some of the stories that the people were trying to convey to others; stories of hunts, wars, birth, life... it was amazing.


 Whether we know the full stories they were telling or not (and the answer is not...), we get to learn a lot about their life styles when they are this literal. Or seem to be, anyway. We definitely can see bows and arrows here though, so we know they were using them, or at least knew what they were. There are places with shields, maybe even battle stories, which wouldn't be surprising considering the mostly uninhabited, inaccessible,  (there's no trash, so likely they were barely used) and hidden houses around the top of the canyon, and the child found in the canyon (skeleton, anyway) with a back deformity and an arrowhead in the chest. It was a time when food was scarce and war was frequent. The area was hard to live in, but worth it for the defense. There are horses with riders, showing the influence that the Spanish had on the area. There are herds of animals that would have been used for food. There is a buffalo with an unborn baby pictures, showing an awareness of the processes of life.
 
 Images of the sun are everywhere, and though we can't be sure what it symbolizes, it was important to life then and now. Next to this one is a image from a rancher or settler drawn in axle grease from their wagons. They didn't respect the people they were living near and fighting for resources; soldiers were known to use the circular and spiral images as targets, and bullet holes still line the canyon. Yet somehow, to me, it adds to the history. Sad. Disrespectful. But history.


Then I came across a man heading for work who pulled over to talk to me for a bit. It turns out that he worked on the road crew that paved the road here, side by side with a team of archaeologists that excavated the canyon as they went, finding bones and artifacts. He knew the canyon inside and out, and took me to some sites that weren't in my book that I probably would have missed completely without his help. One site, the owl panel he called it, had a bear claw and drawings of owls. Hence the name. It had almost as many drawings as the most famous panel, the Great Hunt Panel, but isn't as well known because it faces away from the road and is a little bit of a walk. He pointed me to right rock, told me how to look for more by imagining where people would have been able to stand in order to create the images, and went on his way to work. He never introduced himself, but seeing that panel made the trip so much more amazing and really showed me some of the more skilled, beautiful work in the canyon.

 
 And of course is the Great Hunt Panel, the most famous of all of the sites here, from what I've read. Owned by the local schools, its actually blocked off and has benches for viewing. People are coming to respect these sites more and more, and this one has been conserved by the schools efforts (where as the owls are preserved by an inability to get to them easily.) Its a beautiful scene, showing a few hunters corralling a herd of animals to shoot what they would need to survive. What a story that must have been to hear.