A personal encounter with the people and places of the American Southwest

Friday, July 7, 2017

Myla: Petroglyph Hunter


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.”

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