Day 30 - Bridgeport, Dominguez Canyon and Petroglyphs

The railway takes a mighty curve to follow the Gunnison River.

Up on the first bench overlooking the Gunnison River and a couple of very remote farms.

The first summit.

The crazy sidehill traversed by the trail.

Looking down the Gunnison, past the green pastures and into a narrow red rock section.

The team captain scouts the viability of further travel. Yes - we will proceed.

We are very small.

Ravens don't care much about crazy sidehills.

Moonrise.

The Team arrives back in Base Camp.

The Gunnison Guardian overlooks the rock shelter and all the petroglyphs.

We know there are petroglyphs in the area, as BLM has said so. But, BLM is famously secretive and reticient to mark any positions or give any clues. We find an unmarked trail to a rocky outcrop that seems to have some artificial structures in the distance. Could be the Wildfire Lab again, but no Black Helicopters today.

Behind a big rock, there is an amazing panel. It has been marked and re-marked, so it's hard to interpret everything, but clearly some of the figures are post-European-contact, as evidenced by the man on a horse. There's also antelope, elk, a turtle, a standing man and those magic decoder disks. The disks have appeared on other petroglyphs we have seen and appear to be part of an ancient communications network that works sort of like cell phones, only without Facebook.

This appears to be the oldest panel. No horses, but a really big elk, antelope, a tree and a human figure.

Detail of the horse and rider. We've never seen this one before.

The dark patina on which these petroglyphs were created makes this panel look like a perfect wall hanging.

The petros settle into their environment.

We found three separate versions of this figure on the panels here. They look like hand or foot prints, and all of the samples show six digits. No wonder BLM and Wildfire Lab don't want us to find this stuff. Where are the Black Helicopters?

Renewed topographics - riverside edition.

These folks have just moved from Texas and are feeling a tad homesick.

 

 

 

 

 

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