Full at
http://cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2012/11/28/sego-canyon-rock-art-glory-mining-town-ruins/
"One of the most enjoyable things we do in the southwest is search for
petroglyphs and pictographs, the rock art made by the native peoples. Sometimes
we come upon them as we hike in canyons and at the base of cliffs. Sometimes we
find information about them in books or online, and then we go hunting. It
often takes several tries and some luck, as when, with our son, we finally
located the famous solstice snake near Pritchett Canyon in Moab. When we came
upon it, we gasped in amazement at the serpent, impeccably pecked in the rock,
more than fifteen feet long.
Petroglyphs are designs incised onto the rocks, and they are both more recently
made and more common than pictographs, which were painted onto the rocks,
typically more than 1,500 years ago. It is always special to find rock
paintings. We wonder how they have lasted so long, and we marvel at their
beauty. Their strangeness forces us to ask what they might mean. What were
these ancient artists thinking when they created them?
We saw our first major concentration of pictographs at Sego Canyon in Utah. We
knew they were there, but somehow it took us many visits to nearby Moab before
we went to find them in 2011. So far, we have made three trips to marvel at
what can only be described as astonishing works of art. No matter how many
times we look at them, we are endlessly fascinated and filled with joy.
These glorious rock paintings, made during the archaic period (roughly 8,000 to
1,500 years ago), are a short trip from Exit 187 on Interstate 70, which is
forty-four miles from the Utah-Colorado border. The road off the exit passes
through the nearly deserted town of Thompson Springs, named for E.W. Thompson,
who operated a sawmill in the area. There was a railroad stop here, and cattle
were shipped from it. A spur line from a coal mine five miles up the canyon
gave further life to the place, but the collapse of mining in the 1950s when
trains stopped using coal and the building of Interstate 70 spelled the demise
of Thompson Springs. The 2010 Census notes a population of thirty-nine."
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