Epic Roadtrip 2: Part IV, End of Day 2 and Day 3: Petroglyphs and the Road Home

Lizard Glyph 

Petroglyphs
I've come to realize that graffiti is part of the human DNA.  It has existed since before recorded history.  You might even say graffiti is how history began to be recorded in the first place.  When you look at the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, or anywhere else during the Paleolithic era, and find images depicting a hunt or some other ritual, perhaps we should consider that art to be an historic account.  We've been obsessed with graffiti and history since before the beginning apparently.

There is a difference between petroglyphs and pictographs.  While they both fulfill the same function, which is recording an event for later generations, they are created differently.  A petroglyph (which I will sometimes call a glyph because it makes me sound cooler, like I'm too cool or lazy to say 'petro') is an image that has been cut into the stone by some means, and a pictograph is an image that has been painted onto the stone.  So graffiti spray painted on buildings would be more of a pictograph and when you chisel your initials into that soft rock at the campground that is more of a petroglyph.  All along the pioneer trail there are places that are often called things like "Register Rock" which is basically when the pioneers camped for the evening and went up to a rock and vandalized it with their names and initials.  When we catch people doing that today, we charge them with a misdemeanor, but when we see the evidence of the exact same thing but it happened 150 years ago, we call it history.

Today, nobody knows what the glyphs mean.  There is no Rosetta Stone for cave art.  All we can do is surmise and ascribe deep meanings to the cave art and wonder why the paleolithic people would commemorate their passing in stone.  It's not so different from today's graffiti spray paint artists.  We see what they paint but we really don't know how to read it or interpret it.  Most likely, modern graffiti and ancient graffiti served the same purpose, an opportunity for a graffiti artist to say, "Dave was here."

The Fremont peoples of Utah, who occupied the land long before the modern tribes discovered that the sandstone that is predominant over the southwest was good to carve in.  There is a phenomenon called 'desert varnish' on the sandstone that creates a great canvas for glyph carvers.  When sandstone is exposed to the sun and the other elements it develops a patina or a coating of other minerals.  This patina is most often black, or what passes for black.  Probably due to the high iron content in it, but I am just supposing.  Dang, now I have to go look it up.  I'll be right back.

From the National Park Service

Jun 13, 2018 - Desert varnish is the thin red-to-black coating found on exposed rock surfaces in arid regions. Varnish is composed of clay minerals, oxides and hydroxides of manganese and/or iron, as well as other particles such as sand grains and trace elements.

So I was half right.  Iron and Manganese oxides create desert varnish.  Ancient peoples carved into the desert varnish in a variety of ways.  Sometimes they chipped at it with rocks to abrade it, sometimes the dragged sharp rocks over it to cut it off.  Pretty much, it took a rock to carve a rock.  Because Utah is covered with red sandstone, and the Utah red sandstone is covered with desert varnish, Utah is like the paleolithic graffiti capital of the United States.

In Dinosaur National Monument, there are several glyph sites.  We really only got to spend half a day in Dinosaur National Monument, so we followed the road we were on to it's terminus and then headed back to camp.  Along the way, though we 'found' several glyph sites.  They were on the map and they were marked, but we stopped and saw them.  I always love seeing paleolithic graffiti.  I have long championed the idea that paleolithic man was not so different from us.  All of our knowledge and technology is piggybacked on the things ancient man discovered.  All of it.  And by the way, when I say 'ancient man' I really mean all mankind, not just the male version.  I'm too old to use all the PC terms.

Ancient man/woman found a bone, and some wolf hair.  Then he/she attached the hair to the bone with some sticky animal hide glue that came from the scum when they made skins into leather.  Then, in order to shape the hair into a useful tool, they took some leather and wrapped the base of the hair and created a paintbrush.  This is 20,000 years ago, and the design of paintbrushes have changed very little in that time.  A handle, a ferrule, glue and bristle placed in the same configuration.  Now the materials may have changed, but the design was pure 20,000 years ago and we have done little to improve on it.

Ancient man/woman discovered that if you ground up a colored rock into a fine powder, mixed the powder into some of that sticky, animal hide glue, and thinned it with water, you could create a paint that would stick to rock inside a cave for 20,000 years and mystify your descendants with your artistry when you really were just making graffiti.  Today, we try to preserve that ancient graffiti but we scrub modern graffiti off of buildings and train cars.  Today, the recipe for paint has changed little since the paleolithic age.  Binder or glue, pigment and a thinning vehicle.  Same recipe that ancient man discovered 20,000 years ago.  We may have 'improved' some of the ingredients with chemistry but the basic recipe is literally the same.

But wait, I have one more.  Ancient man/woman discovered that if you put paint in a shallow vessel, and then drilled a hole in the middle of a hollow bird bone, positioned the hole over the vessel with paint in it and blew through the bone, you could create a vacuum that would lift the liquid paint out of the vessel, atomize it and direct the flow toward a surface.  They would have people place their hands on a wall and blow the paint around it.  This is prevalent everywhere in the world where rock art is found.  So what we have is an airbrush and a frisket.  The physics are the same whether you blow through a bone or if you use an auto body spray gun.  Air blows through a straight pipe that has a hole in it which creates a vacuum and lifts the liquid paint out of a vessel and blows it toward the surface you wish to paint.  Graffiti artists still use friskets (like the hand placed on the wall to keep the paint off that section) to create borders and distinctions between colors.

So maybe we should give Og the caveman a break.

Here are some images of caveman art that are found in Dinosaur National Monument.

Proof of ancient aliens or that ancient man wasn't very good at realism

Some kind of animal

These guys mean business

So, this is interesting.  The two figures at the bottom are a combination
of petroglyphs and pictographs.  That shows sophistication and an ability
for rational thought.  Let's stop thinking these guys wee unsophisticated
brutes.  They were not.  All of our modern knowledge derives from what
these people learned and discovered.  

Deep carving

We had to climb to some of the glyph sites

Like this one

Landscape pic.  See the rock layers that are near vertical?  The same Laramide Orogeny that tilted the bone layer at the quarry site is responsible for this.

Not a pictograph, but I bet I could make a paintbrush out of it

The road to the glyph sites was dirt, not paved.  It was an improved dirt road.  No potholes really.  The dirt track wound around geography like this

Not a glyph, but someone made a glyph out of one of these (First pic on the blog post)

There might have been glyphs here or it might have just been cool

I think this guy gave up

This might be an old lady

The world's first instagram selfie

Bighorn sheep, I think

Then there was this guy

Maybe an attempt at an alphabet, or maybe Og said, "In 10,000 years someone is going to see this and spend years trying to decipher what it means."  And then Marvin, the Caveman said, "Wow, Og, you're kind of a jerk!"

This looks like an ancient still.  Perhaps they were fermenting peyote because hallucinations, dang

They would have had to have a ladder or a scaffold to carve this one

We may never know what these things mean.  We can surmise, but without a written language, it is all just conjecture

I think this guy killed a deer

This guy is wearing a turban

This is some of the scenery near the glyph sites.

The End of the Road:  The Josie Basset Morris Homestead
At the end of the dirt track we were on, past all of the marked petroglyph sites was an old homestead.  I know almost nothing about the lady who lived here.

Here is a wikipedia link to Josie Basset Morris.

Apparently, she was a pretty colorful lady who homesteaded this property with her husband, Ben Morris in 1914.  Her family had a homestead in the area.  When she was young, she knew several outlaws including Butch Cassidy.  She was married 5 times and divorced four of them.  She made moonshine during prohibition and was arrested for cattle rustling in the 1930's during the Great Depression.  She was a pretty colorful character.  She lived on the homestead until 1963 when she fell on the ice and broke her hip at the age of 90.  Who knew there were colorful characters like this in Utah?

Interpretive materials

One of the outbuildings, now in ruins

She lived here without running water, electricity or indoor plumbing for fifty years

Gateposts

More interpretive materials

Log construction.  The home was built as a rectangle and added on to some years later

She never got wood floors

Day 3:  Striking Camp and the Road Home
The Hot Chick and I aren't too old to camp, and we like doing it.  Someday we might be too old to camp and maybe we can afford to stay in hotels at that stage in our lives.  Or maybe we'll drag a Jayco around.  Who knows.  The rest of the family likes to camp as well.

We were camped in the Ashley National Forest at the Skull Creek Campground.  If you know me, you know my obsession with all things skully, and that I have a daughter named Ashley.  So there you go.  It was destined for us to camp here.  From what I have heard, they closed the Skull Creek Campground the next year.  Dunno about that, what I heard.

The Hot Chick always does a science experiment with the grandkids when we camp.  She shows how to boil water over a fire in a paper cup.  Always a good time.  I'll show a few pics of the campground and us striking camp.  I don't usually show alot of pics about the way home, but we did stop in Kemmerer, Wyoming (pronounced Kemmer) for a picnic and ended up going to a rock shop and seeing some amazing fossils for sale.  I took pictures for the blog.

On the way home we came back through Swan Valley, Idaho.  It's a pretty drive near where we live, and in the river canyon you can plainly see up to seven lava flows layered one on top of the other.  When we get to Swan Valley, it's only about a half an hour to home.

Ashley National Forest

Skull Creek Campground

Sitting around the fire 

My grandsons 

More of my grandsons

Boiling water in a paper cup.  Tricks by The Hot Chick

Striking camp.  Everybody helped

We told them to act crazy

Time to go home

Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area

Fossils from the Green River Formation

This turtle is over five feet long from tail to snout

Big fish

Palm frond with knightia fish

My granddaughter was on the trip too

Apparently, something at lunch tasted bad

Almost home

Swan Valley, Idaho.  See what I have to put up with?  Idaho is sooooooo ugly!

Beauty.

We hope to go back on another family trip to Fossil Butte and Dinosaur National Monuments.  We may do it on a bigger trip where we get to Mesa Verde National Park.  Who knows.  No fixed plans at the moment.  This was a great trip, though and we look forward to doing it again someday.

Epic Road Trip 2:  Part I

Epic Road Trip 2:  Part II

Epic Road Trip 2:  Part III