Ancient Artists

Canyonlands NP is an amazing destination for people who enjoy solitude, desert, hiking, camping, biking, archeology. The park is 527 sq miles - and simply cannot be covered in one day or even one week. Canyonlands gets an average of 440,000 visitors a year, yet many of the people who pass through the park never see what I consider to be one the most fascinating and inspiring places in the world. It's a site called the Great Gallery, located deep in very remote Horseshoe Canyon. This canyon receives only about 3% of the parks visitors. It’s a great place to "get away from it all." In fact, Wikipedia calls it "one of the most remote and inaccessible areas of the United States".
Visiting the Great Gallery takes determination and time. Moab, Utah is about 3 hrs away. After nearly 2 hrs of paved road, the final leg begins on a very rough dirt road dotted with dips and potholes the size of a small car! The "graded" dirt road is 30 miles long, and if you take it late in the season (i.e. months after the last time it was graded) you might think it's not maintained at all.
The descent down into the canyon is 780 vertical feet, following old exploration roads over slick rock and sandy trails. The Great Gallery is a 3.5 mile hike from the canyon rim, meandering upstream along the wash. The hike is challenging in that most of the way along the canyon floor one is walking in soft sand, which can sap one's energy after only a few miles.
In the autumn of 2014 we visited this ancient site again. We arrived at the canyon rim before sunset, prepared our gear, had dinner and tried to get some rest before our long next day. We felt a tad lonely as we sat in the deep silence with just a few birds and a couple of parked vehicles.
The rock art in Horseshoe Canyon is mostly Barrier Canyon Style, dating from approximately 2,000 BC to 800 AD. Some artifacts found in the area date as far back as 9,000-7,000 BC! These amazing panels have been well preserved by the sheer remoteness of the canyon... and more recently by the National Park Service. It is important for me to know that these places exist, that others have made it their life work to help preserve them.
After a long, tiring, and exciting day exploring Horseshoe Canyon we joked that every sound outside our van that evening was the Archaic People coming for a visit. The stars were awe-inspiring and any other human habitation seemed far away. We vowed to return to this magical place while our bodies would still carry us.