Day 1

Start your rock-art tour east of Cedar City at Parowan Gap, a narrow rock pass where ancient artists chiseled images more than 1,000 years ago. Who knows what kinds of meanings these pictographs—of geometric designs, lizards, bear claws, and human figures—had for travelers through this pass.

Day 2

Make your way east along Hwy. 12, which runs past Bryce Canyon. Stop between the towns of Escalante and Boulder at the Boynton Overlook and scan the cliff face across the river to see a pictograph of many handprints. It’s possible to scramble up for a closer look from the parking area where Hwy. 12 crosses the Escalante River.

Continue east, then north up to Capitol Reef. Petroglyphs of horned mountain sheep and humans in feathered headdresses are easily viewed from a parking area along Hwy. 24 in Fremont River Canyon. These are some of the most easily reached rock-art panels in Utah.

Day 3

From the Capitol Reef area, cut south along Hwy. 95 to Blanding. From there, continue southeast to the Hovenweep National Monument, one of Utah’s best-preserved Anasazi villages. There, among the ruins, you’ll find many petroglyphs.

The most interesting are in the Holly Ruins, where a series of spirals and concentric rings served as a calendar for ancient farmers. Shafts of light from the rising sun illuminate the petroglyphs. By aligning the designs, the Anasazi were able to mark the summer solstice and the fall and spring equinoxes.

Day 4

From the Blanding area, drive north on U.S. 191 to the entrance road of the Needles District of Canyonlands. Drive west a few miles toward the park to find Newspaper Rock, another easily reached showcase of rock art. The immense rock face is a collage of fantastic creatures, footprints, abstract designs, hunters on horseback, and wild animals—in all, 2,000 years of art on a boulder.

Continue north to Arches. On the hiking trail to Delicate Arch is an often overlooked panel of Ute Style rock-art images. Images like these, of mounted horsemen hunting mountain sheep, are clearly from the historical period, since horses reached America from Spanish colonies.

Day 5

The town of Green River is a good home base for today’s touring. One of the most important rock-art sites in the United States is the Great Gallery in Canyonlands’ Horseshoe Canyon Unit. In fact, the park service created the unit specially to protect this trove of incomparable art. Human-sized images of ghost spirits cover the walls—this was clearly a sacred place for thousands of years. That it’s reached after a half day of backcountry driving and hiking only adds to the magic.

Depending on how long you spend in Horseshoe Canyon, make the trip to Sego Canyon on the same day or the following morning (it’s half an hour east of Green River on I-80). Sego Canyon is a vast gallery of prehistoric art, where you’ll find hundreds of etched images, starting with 8,000-year-old figures of ghostly, shamanic-looking creatures right out of sci-fi movies and extending up to the historic period, when Utes created images of humans using firearms, probably from the 18th century.

Day 6

Continue north on U.S. 191 to near Price, where you will take back roads to Nine Mile Canyon. Few people travel these dusty (but perfectly passable in dry weather) roads, but the rewards are great: There are a number of excellent rock-art panels and ancient grain caches tucked into the cliffs, and the scenery in the always deepening canyon is spectacular.

Day 7

After the previous day’s back-road adventure, today’s trip to Dry Fork Petroglyphs seems relatively simple. Yet these easily reached rock-art galleries, found northwest of Vernal, are also rarely visited. These spectacular images of life-sized human figures, many adorned with elaborate headdresses, are considered to be some of the best in the nation and resemble those in Horseshoe Canyon, which are reached only after a four-hour hike.

© W.C. McRae and Judy Jewell from Moon Utah, 8th Edition