Here There and Everywhere

Chasing Petroglyphs: Tour of the Tilted Rocks

We leave the Wall of Bones to go back to the visitor center to pick up our car and hit The Tour of the Tilted Rocks.

Most of the visitors in this late May time frame seemed to be people in our demographic, 60s and older, people out exploring our country as singles and couples. We saw a couple of groups, and a couple of tours, but most of the people we saw looked a lot like us – retired, with the luxury of time to go exploring.

Most of these people were, like us, physically fit enough to climb the uneven trails, climb a few slippery rocks and hike straight uphill to view the petroglyphs. 

Leaving the Quarry Hall “Wall of Bones,” we got into our car for the “Tour of the Tilted Rocks” and spent the next couple of hours engaging with the spectacular scenery, helped along by both the brochure and the frequent guideposts along the way. We visited four separate petroglyph sites and countless sites of geological and paleontological interest. 

A wealth of petroglyphs! I can see similarities in these glyphs to the Fremont glyphs we saw yesterday, but these are more on the level of scratch sheets, practice for the advanced figures we saw at the McConkie ranch. You can see some elementary necklaces. I overheard in a passing group a person say that square heads are men and more rounded heads are women. I’m not sure that is true, but now I have more to evaluate.

Yet another site; love this . . . headdress? Or is it a jug with flowers – and legs?

The shoulder – waist proportion appears to be still evolving here. I can see a crescent moon and indications that some figures are probably men. Or maybe fertile women, with the moon?

So does the round head mean this is a woman? Her body seems more elaborately patterned than others. She appears to be waving. In some cultures, the spiral indicates long life, but maybe it can also mean a trail of life or a giver of life? More questions than answers 🙂

As the day heats up, these climbs seem more aggressive. We have hats, we have water and the dry heat sucks the moisture out of us.

So, a square head with elaborate patterning, maybe slaying a deer? So no, elaborate patterning is not a female thing.

This site has a lot of lizards

I would love to know what this is about. An altar, with celestial bodies above? I wish I had a clue.

On the way back to Vernal, we had lunch at the Naples Country Cafe. I ordered the Naples Country Breakfast, and thank God for a helpful waitress who asked me what kind of gravy I wanted over it all. I hadn’t read it very carefully, just saw that it had a couple of eggs. She advised me to get the Junior version of it, and I asked for no gravy, no cheese. What arrived at the table was two eggs over easy on a plate full of hash brown potatoes, with a sausage, a slice of bacon and a piece of ham, and two slices of sourdough bread with homemade boysenberry jam. I was picky about what I allowed myself to eat, but I did eat all the jam, on half a slice of bread, because it was so irresistibly delicious. 

We got back to our room mid-afternoon to rest or nap a little, and to pack up for our drive tomorrow down to our cabin outside of Moab, Trail’s End at Pack Creek, which we hope will provide four nights of spectacular night sky viewing.

June 12, 2022 - Posted by intlxpatr | Adventure, Aging, Arts & Handicrafts, Beauty, Cultural, Exercise, Public Art, Road Trips, Travel | Jensen, petroglyphs, Tour of the Tilted Rocks, Utah, Vernal