PETROGLYPHS AND ROCK ART

Here are a bunch of images from recent petroglyphs that Zeus and I visited in June and July of 2025, as well as a few sketches. I love exploring the images by re-drawing them.

About 10 years ago, I camped at a spot in Southern Colorado with some friends on the edge of a tiny canyon. The walls of that unassuming canyon had the most amazing petroglyph deer. They had giant antlers, stacked tall and perfectly magical. They mimicked some of the branching scrub bushes in the prairies that surrounded the area. I had not brought a camera or my sketchbook, in no way expecting to be arrested by rock drawings. Now I could an ancestor-artists’s joy vibrating through each additional layer of horns–until into the near-silence an authoritative voice: GET BACK HERE NOW!

Unfortunately, it seems that when we took off on our hike around the inner canyon, no one had doused the fire ring. Looking at us from our camp directly across the canyon was a ranger and he was not happy.

I can’t recall exactly how it was that I didn’t go back (after prostrations to the ranger) that very moment after the lecture and finish exploring the petroglyphs, but I did not. When I finally made it back there a few years ago, someone had done their darnedest to hide all the drawings, obscuring them behind piles of cut branches and obstructing the old paths. I don’t blame them. In my mind, there was a perfect panel, dark with light colored stack-antlered deer charging in a glorious herd. Since I am conjuring this, I will add in human figures with similar headgear running alongside.

I did manage to find a few of the pieces when I returned, but nothing like the panel in my imagination.