Here's an interesting place to visit. It's called Newspaper Rock between Moab, Utah and Cortez, Colorado. An entire wall, 200 square feet, is covered with Petroglyphs (or rock art, or wall carvings.)
 
 
The road is 12 miles off the state highway and, for the most part, a nice ride. We took it easy at 40 mph.


Then we came upon the outcrop...had to veer to the left.


We descended in to a canyon. The MPH signs went from 50 to 30 to 20 to 15mph !!! We took it real slow around the last couple of hairpin turns going downhill before we came to the parking lot.


You will notice my photo captions all end with a question mark. No one knows, to the day, what any of these mean. Amazing.

 

The first carvings at the Newspaper Rock site were made around 2,000 years ago, left by people from the Archaic, Anasazi, Fremont, Navajo, Anglo, and Pueblo cultures.

In Navajo, the rock is called "Tse' Hone'" which translates to a rock that tells a story.

The petroglyphs were carved by Native Americans during both the prehistoric and historic periods. There are over 650 rock art designs. The drawings on the rock are of different
animals, human figures, and symbols. These carvings include pictures of deer, buffalo, and pronghorn antelope. Some glyphs depict riders on horses, while other images depict past events like in a newspaper. While precisely dating the rock carvings has been difficult, repatination of surface minerals reveals their relative ages. The reason for the large concentration of the petroglyphs is unclear.

The pictures at Newspaper Rock were inscribed into the dark coating on the rock, called desert varnish. Desert varnish is a blackish manganese-iron deposit that gradually forms on exposed sandstone cliff faces owing to the action of rainfall and bacteria. The ancient artists produced the many types of figures and patterns by carefully pecking the coated rock surfaces with sharpened tools to remove the desert varnish and expose the lighter rock beneath. The older figures are themselves becoming darker in color as new varnish slowly develops.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_Rock_State_Historic_Monument



Now we can check this off our places-we-must-see list.

Steve and Kim