Comb Ridge, as I’ve referenced the past two Tuesdays, is a monocline running north to south in eastern Utah. Butler Wash drains the east side with a dusty road roughly paralleling the wash. Plenty of unmarked side tracks lead off the road, and we followed one to camp next to the wash. In the morning, Scorpio lay near the horizon, but soon faded away as Venus, Jupiter and the Moon lead the sun to greet the day.
We looked south to where we’d be exploring for the rest of the day.
By late afternoon, we’d done several hikes. Two were in unmarked areas that looked interesting, and one was up Cold Spring Cave that I mentioned two weeks ago. None of these areas are signed, but many are well known and easy to get the coordinates for. Just south of Cold Spring Cave is Monarch Cave. My Google timeline map shows the small canyons cut into the ridge that were home to the Ancestral Puebloans and those before them.
We’d only met a few people at Cold Spring and no one else earlier in the day, so it was surprising to see several cars parked at the pull out for Monarch Cave, including a big, white pickup with government plates. The hike starts by going down into Butler Wash before climbing up the other side. A group slowly walked toward us, so Chance and I got off the trail in the shade of the wash to wait, and we chatted with the first hiker. She was the director of Native affairs for Bears Ears National Monument. She and several BLM staff led a pilgrimage for Paiute elders on a pilgrimage to the ancestral homes. We exchanged greetings as they worked their ways on the path. An auspicious start for our journey into this monument created at the urging of five local tribes.
While the hike is not strenuous, it is by no means easy navigating the roots, rocks and boulders especially with the canes and walking sticks the elders were using. I’d downloaded some off line maps for this and other hikes I was thinking of taking on the trip. Some of the areas don’t have defined trails, and it’s not hard to lose your way on some of the routes, especially when going across slickrock, and it’s rare to have cell service in the area. The downloaded trail maps work well with GPS and are a great help in finding the way to your trail or destination, or more importantly, back to your car. It’s also helpful to have a dog who often has better scents finding the right route than I do with my eyes.
This time Chance and I both got off the route. While hiking up a relatively narrow canyon you won’t get lost, you’ll just not get the easiest route. Looking at our GPS dot on the All Trails app, we could hike back down to find the trail or just go up and along the cliff near us to follow it toward the head of the canyon. We headed up to the cliff and walked along it. Eventually, ahead of us was a cluster of trees with one tall one growing very close to the cliff wall blocking our way. I needed to take my water pack off and squeeze sideways between the tree and cliff to continue on.
And there, nose-to-nose was a three foot anthropomorph staring at me!
This picture was a challenge to take. With the tree right behind me, I had to step back and open to my widest lens to fit the fellow in, and then I started seeing the other figures. With Chance resting in the shade, I retraced our way back along the cliff. Going back forty or fifty feet, the wall was filled with petroglyphs that I had been blind to walking right along side until this fellow jumped me.
Above this guy was a long line over thirty feet continuing on past the tree and back to where I’d been. Craig Childs writes: “What I and most other rock art followers and archaeologists call a centipede—a straight line of any length with many smaller lines and dashes coming off of it, sometimes with two antenna-like segments at one end— [Rory] Tyler believes represents brush fences for hunting and channeling game, as bristled, frightening, and impassable as giant centipedes. When he looks at the country around him, Tyler sees hunting landscapes. Rock art shows how it was done and what magic was needed to make it happen.”
Craig Childs, Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau (2022), p 110.
A little further back and just below the centipede were these spirals. Childs devotes a chapter in his book to Spirals and Concentric Circles. He shares the interpretations of his Zuni friend Chris Lewis.
Lewis sees spirals as information. To him, they tell which way people came from and which way they were going. Some unravel into a tail that can be traced across a rockface to where the line comes out of a small divot pecked into the rock. That divot is an emergence place or a destination, the line and the spiral being the journey taken once you’ve stepped foot in the world. He said that linked spirals, which look like disks of converging or departing galaxies, show communities either splitting or coming together. He told me what they portray depends on where the spirals are placed, clockwise facing north, or counter-clockwise facing south. Variables of possible placements and directions are as numerous as stories of migration among Pueblo people. Movement is written into the foundation of these people. Over their history, their journeys might look like a turning, changing circle, a constant search for a center-place, every bend honing inward.
Childs, Tracing Time, p 44. Yes, these south facing spirals turn counter-clockwise.
For [Lewis], these [experiences] were choices along the curve of a spiral that is a person’s life. He said, “You may be one of those things, but at some point, through life and experiences, you spiral into your truth and find your center.
Childs, Tracing Time, p 43
.After exploring this panel, it was time to squeeze past the tree again, say good-bye to the fellow who stopped me, and continue the hike. It was not too far to find the old structures.
Monarch Cave, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah
This was part of the 85% of Bears Ears National Monument that Donald Trump removed from protection as a national monument to open it up to drilling and extraction rights. This was the first time a president used the Antiquities Act to remove land from federal protection. Trump is man who has no truth and no center. One of President Biden’s first acts was to fully restore the monument.
Like the one above, an image I posted from nearby Cold Spring Cave had similar polished holes which I described as used for grinding corn. The narrow shape didn’t make sense to me, but my imagination for other uses was limited. Childs explained them:
Carol Patterson, a Four Corners scholar and ethnohistorian, has visited these grinders and tells me they are paint pots. Grinding corn, she notes, requires a rectangular trough, deeper, wider and sometimes with peck marks in the bottom for breaking up the corn kernels. . . The grinding holes in the cave have smooth, almost glassed bottoms, and are relatively small, not meant for the industrious work of crushing corn. Seeing handprints all around, and recognizing pigment dishes, Patterson believes these were made for pulverizing minerals to be mixed with water and a fixative. This would have been where paint was made for going up on the walls. The blue-greens are all the same blue-greens, yellows all the same yellows, reds all the same reds. Preparing pigment is a science.
Ute elder Clifford Duncan . . . explained to her that the depressions on a large flat slab of fallen rock in front of them had been an important gathering place for these paint parties.
Childs, Tracing Time, p 21-22.
The panel I first stumbled upon was nearly all petroglyphs pecked into the cliff. However, here by the buildings, there’d been lots of painting parties. The galleries were filled with pictographs, and most of those seemed to be handprints. Childs has a chapter devoted to them:
The late anthropologist Florence Hawley Ellis wrote in 1968, “Tracing one’s hand on the wall of a scared place brings a blessing into one’s self, like ‘taking the breath’ from any sacred object.” Ellis . . . described the completion of a ceremony where a leader paints his hand white and presses it against the kiva or cave wall to signify that he has carried out his religious duty. . . . Ellis’s knowledge was earned from time spent with Indigenous people descended from these pictograph makers. She saw handprints as drawing supernatural forces to a point, so that spirits that have been called will know where to direct their blessing.
. . .
Stenciled hands outlined in paint . . . tend to come later during the Pueblo era, the time of multi-story room blocks and masonry villages. For a stencil, pigment was sprayed around the hand leaving a negative impression on the rock.
. . .
The first question that may come up is, what does it mean? After sitting with a site for longer, you’ll wonder instead, what does it express? Questions eventually turn to who made it, who was meant to see it, and where do you stand between these two?
Childs, Tracing Time, pp 15-17.
In respect to people who lived here, to the elders who had just visited, and to those yet to come, Chance stayed tied in a shady spot below the cave. He talked to me once in a while, but we, and those from the past were the only ones here. While most of the images were handprints, some larger figures floated by. I assume this is a woman with her hair in buns aside her head.
These upright drifting figures, however, are beyond death, possibly immortal. “Hands are neutralized, feet are not walking,” [Carol Peterson] said. “These guys have transformed into spirit.” The term she gave them was cloud beings.
. . .
Micah Loma’omvaya, an archaeologist and anthropologist, member of the Bear Clan at Hopi, has a similar angle. [He] told me that these were holy people, those in contact with the supernatural. “Whenever you see hands this way,” he said, holding his hands downward, “it is knowledge, the knowledge of how to create life.”
. . .
I side with Loma’omvaya, where understanding does not come from books as much as it does from walking and talking in fields of rock art. It comes from being there, receiving a place with your senses and from the perspectives of others. Being here is the cleanest way for me to come to understanding. Looking at these floating figures, you don’t have to be told by scientists and scholars that they are beyond human. You feel it.
Chris Lewis, a farmer, weaver, and keeper of stories from Zuni Pueblo, called these figures spirit beings, and said the Zuni word for spirit translates into English as the word raw. “They are raw beings,” he told me. “When you’re born, you’re raw, and when you’re dying, you’re raw. That’s when you sense and know the spirit world. After we’re born, when we’re our age, we’re not raw anymore. We’re cooked.”
Childs, Tracing Time, pp 28-30.
As you move along the wall, more signs appear then were there when you first walked by. Some low, some eye level, some above you. In places there are holes in the rock where beams once supported a roof. The art above perhaps could only be seen if you were on the roof.
Then you find a wall flooded with images, the definition of a palimpsest, figures overwritten, older ones showing through from below. Images seems to be swimming among one another, a swirling school, a murmuration.
I am mistaken thinking these were meant for me to see. A flock of birds doesn’t spot me and think, Oh good, he’s looking. They serve their own purpose. Mine is to look up and notice.
Standing inside a shelter covered with hundreds of red-painted figures is bewildering. I don’t know where my eye should land. . . . If you walk up to a panel and have no idea where to start, even after staring for a minute or two, it’s probably not a panel, but a gallery.
. . .
When I looked to the ground, I saw dishes polished in the bedrock. These had been used to hold pigment, brushes dipped and brought to the wall. The chamber hummed with life force, memory, power, whatever you want to call it. . . . Whatever I imagined of these figures, they came down to the simple fact of people leaving many memories in one place. It is what Carol Patterson calls, “the presence of meaning.” You don’t have to know what it is, only that it exists.
Childs, Tracing Time, pp 135, 141-142.
The visit that started with the elders, that continued with the three-foot man staring at me, stopping me in my tracks and telling me to look, was coming to an end. I heard voices coming up the canyon. We were no longer alone with these memories on the walls. I laid on the ground to get a last picture of the gallery above my head. As if they were going up for the first time, I saw red hands, then white, black, green and the silhouette of one over all the others. And then I couldn’t see any. There in the desert, my eyes were filled with water.
Try not to let you mind play tricks on you. Try not to think of anything at all. Listen to your breath and make the walk a contemplation, moonless and suspended. There’s no doubt in my mind the land is haunted. It’s not a childhood fantasy. So many memories cannot be in one place without continuing to ring.
. . .
Ways of responding to these galleries are countless. You come to them with dread, elation, curiosity. Imagine painters running brushes all over, one after the next, a time-lapse of generations. You see an artist in silence working alone, like Michelangelo lying on his back, pigment flecking off a ceiling into his eyes.
This is how easily some art can be destroyed. Paint hangs on by a crust and it feels like a single breath could make it come down. A simple act, a brush of the hand, could cause time to end.
Childs, Tracing Time, pp 138, 140.