Uncompahgre
Plateau, Colorado
My Journeys
with Myla, pt. 4
Note: This is the fourth in a
sequence of blog entries concerning my travels with Myla, a superb dog of
uncertain breed (we think she’s half rat terrier and half dachshund) who was found
barely surviving on the streets of Grand Junction and rescued by a group called
Grand Rivers Humane. We adopted her in the autumn of 2013, and she has been a
beloved part of our family ever since.
We’ve had Myla for nearly three years now, and
we’ve done a lot of exploring together. During the first year of our journeys,
I discovered that Myla is not only a lizard-hunter, but she is a
petroglyph-hunter as well.
It was late spring of 2014, and Myla and I were
taking a hike in one of my favorite canyons on the Uncompahgre Plateau. (I’m
not going to name the canyon for reasons that will become clear.) At the time
of this hike, I knew there were petroglyphs in this canyon, but I had never
found them, despite hiking there a good ten to twelve times a year. Well, this
one spring day, we were heading down canyon, following the main trail as usual,
when Myla started up a dusty side path that climbed towards the western cliff
face. I almost called her back, but decided to follow instead. We passed through
dense patches of sagebrush and juniper, and soon arrived at a tumble of sandstone
boulders and debris at the base of the cliff. To my surprise, I could just make
out that past these boulders the cliff face held a set of petroglyphs. Myla had
discovered the mysterious petroglyphs that I had failed to find for nearly
twenty years!
We scrambled atop the boulders closest to the
cliff, and there they were, pecked out of the smooth sandstone surface
centuries ago – several horned shaman around two foot high, and two abstract
shapes built on a set of arcs. From their style and age, I would guess they
were either late Fremont or early Ute Indian figures. It was a fairly modest
display, but I was nonetheless excited about finding them at long last. And I
had Myla to thank for their discovery.
What saddened me, however, were several pieces of
graffiti next to the petroglyphs, some drawn with charcoal-coated sticks from
an old nearby campfire, but some, the far more destructive kind, scratched into
the sandstone. These names, obscenities, and images of skulls were a violation
of the sacred, a sacrilege equal to the defacement of a cathedral or synagogue.
Unfortunately, just a few days ago I went to the
same petroglyph site, and the amount of graffiti at the site has tripled from
when Myla first took me to them. I have watched this increase take place
steadily over the past couple of years. It seems every time I visit the site,
there’s another defacement, and the graffiti is starting to cover the
petroglyphs themselves.
I have written about this problem before in this
blog, when I described a petroglyph site near Moab, Utah (see “Watchers of the
Skies” – February 18th, 2016). As I did in that entry, I would like
to quote National Book Award winning author Barry Lopez, who brilliantly
expresses the depth of this tragedy in his essay “The Stone Horse,” from Crossing Open Ground (Vintage Books,
1989): “The vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert’s walls, who
dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios, are people who
devour history. Their self-centered scorn, their disrespect for ideas and
images beyond their ken, create the awful atmosphere of loose ends in which
totalitarianism thrives, in which the past is merely curious or wrong.”
