The Great Gallery

This morning, we woke up early, made breakfast, packed up the van, and hit the trail to the Great Gallery.  We were on the trail by 8:30 and didn't see anyone else all the way down, which was a real treat.  The only bad part was that the winds had not completely gone away, but they had subsided a lot, which was a big relief!

The trail went down the canyon wall pretty easily (a little steep, but no ledges or ladders).  Once we reached the bottom of the canyon, the trail followed the wash (creek bed), which had a lot of sand and wasn't very easy to walk in.  After a short distance, the wash had a small amount of water in it, so the sand around it was damp and packed down.  The walking was much easier in those areas.

We saw three smaller walls with Indian rock art on them on our way to the Great Gallery.  One of the areas is called the Alcove, and is basically a natural amphitheater in the canyon wall.  Voices and sounds were really amplified even if you were out in the creek bed facing the alcove (you didn't have to be standing up in it to get the effect).  Pretty neat.

At the end of the 7-mile trail, we reached the Great Gallery and were still the only people there.  It was even more amazing than I had hoped!  The panel is very large (containing a lot of different figures and animals), as well as having very large paintings.  The largest figure is 8 feet tall, and many of them were around 4-5 feet tall. This made these figures life-sized for the Indian groups that would have been painting them, which is very unusual in itself.

What truly makes this panel of art unusual is the subjects of the paintings.....not scenes of everyday life (like hunting, etc.).  One of the figures is called "the Holy Ghost," many of them appear to be some type of celestial or alien beings.  They have no feet or hands, and the bottoms of the figures kind of trail off, like some type of ghost.  A few of them have odd-shaped heads, with large round eyes (kind of like the 50's alien pictures).  One lone figure off to the side actually looks like a large angel, with wings at the shoulders.  Of course, nobody knows for sure what this panel of art means, but it really seemed to have a special meaning to the people who made it and it made me feel as if I was kind of intruding into something private (like walking into a church).

We stopped for a picnic lunch on the hike out and made it back to our van about 1:30 p.m. and headed out of Horseshoe Canyon.  The winds had picked back up and more sand and dust was blowing around today than there was yesterday.  Those 32 miles seemed just as long going out as they had coming in the day before.  I was really glad to get out of there.

We continued west to Capitol Reef National Park, which has some interesting rock formations, as well as a large area of fruit orchards (which are still maintained), as well as some preserved Mormon settlement buildings (blacksmith, school, etc.)  We were planning to camp near there, but a storm was blowing in when we arrived (down below freezing and 40% chance of snow before midnight), so we decided to backtrack a few miles to a nice little Rodeway Inn and hole up for the night.

Hopefully, the weather will improve for tomorrow (it's supposed to) and we are planning to head south where I'm counting on it being warmer as we go......fingers crossed (again)!!