Horseshoe Canyon, formerly known as Barrier Canyon, is in a remote area west of the Green River and north of the

Canyonlands National Park Canyonlands National Park is an American national park located in southeastern Utah near the town of Moab. The park preserves a colorful landscape eroded into numerous canyons, mesas, and buttes by the Colorado River, the Green River, and their ...

Maze District in

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to its ...

, United States. It is known for its collection of

Barrier Canyon Style Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) describes a distinctive style of rock art which appears mostly in Utah, with the largest concentration of sites in and around the San Rafael Swell and Canyonlands National Park, but the full range extends into much of the ...

(BCS) rock art, including both

pictograph A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and g ...

s and

petroglyph A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions ...

s, which was first recognized as a unique style here. A portion of Horseshoe Canyon containing The Great Gallery is part of a detached unit of

. The Horseshoe Canyon Unit was added to the park in 1971 in an attempt to preserve and protect the rock art found along much of its length.

History

Human presence in Horseshoe Canyon has been dated as far back as 9000-7000 B.C., when Paleo-Indians hunted large mammals such as

mastodon A mastodon ( 'breast' + 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus ''Mammut'' (family Mammutidae). Mastodons inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the ...

s and

mammoth A mammoth is any species of the extinct elephantid genus ''Mammuthus'', one of the many genera that make up the order of trunked mammals called proboscideans. The various species of mammoth were commonly equipped with long, curved tusks an ...

s across the southwest. Later inhabitants included the Desert Archaic culture, the

Fremont culture The Fremont culture or Fremont people is a pre-Columbian archaeological culture which received its name from the Fremont River in the U.S. state of Utah, where the culture's sites were discovered by local indigenous peoples like the Navajo and ...

, and

Ancestral Puebloans The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, were an ancient Native American culture that spanned the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, a ...

. Occupation by the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans was relatively brief; it is believed that the canyon was abandoned by Native American peoples by 1300 A.D. The Great Gallery is one of the largest and best preserved collections of

rock art. The gallery was a product of the Desert Archaic culture, a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers predating the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans. The panel itself measures about long and high. The panel contains about 20 life-sized anthropomorphic images, the largest of which measures over tall. A

Works Projects Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

produced reproduction of the paintings is located at the

Natural History Museum of Utah The Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU) is a museum located in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The museum shows exhibits of natural history subjects, with an emphasis on Utah and the Intermountain West. The mission of the museum is to il ...

. The Holy Ghost panel of the Great Gallery has been dated to between 400 A.D. and 1100 A.D. by dating two rockfall events of which one exposed the rock face the panel on which it was made and the second damaging part of the panel.Utah's famous Canyonlands rock art unexpectedly recent
By Brian Maffly, August 27, 2014, The Salt Lake Tribune GreatGalleryPanel

Access

The Horseshoe Canyon trailhead is located on the west rim of the canyon. It can be accessed from State Route 24 via of graded dirt road, or from Green River via of dirt road. Both routes include segments of road that may become impassable when wet. Visitors may camp at the west rim trailhead, on public land managed by the

Bureau of Land Management The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is an agency within the United States Department of the Interior responsible for administering federal lands. Headquartered in Washington DC, and with oversight over , it governs one eighth of the country's ...

, or BLM. A vault toilet is provided but there is no water available. Overnight camping is not permitted in Horseshoe Canyon inside the Park boundaries. To see the rock art, visitors must descend 750 vertical feet (228 m) to the canyon bottom and hike approximately . The hike from the West Rim trailhead to the Great Gallery is roughly round trip, and requires 3 to 6 hours to complete. The trail is fairly well marked, but reaching the Great Gallery requires a certain amount of stamina and endurance, particularly in the heat. Three other significant panels of rock art are passed en route to the Great Gallery.

References

External links

Canyonlands National Park
- Horseshoe Canyon

- History of Horseshoe Canyon
Canyonlands National Park - Archeology of Horseshoe Canyon
online-book 74 pages

- Description and Photos of Horseshoe Canyon

{{Registered Historic Places Canyons and gorges of Utah Landforms of Wayne County, Utah National Register of Historic Places in Canyonlands National Park Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Utah Petroglyphs in Utah National Register of Historic Places in Wayne County, Utah

History

Access

See also

References

External links