Horse Canyon
Needles District
Overview
In the southeastern corner of the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park lies Horse Canyon, a remote and rugged corridor where the deep-red sandstone of the high desert meets the traces of ancient civilizations. This is a place a friend recommended to me years ago. When I finally visited, I found it strikingly beautiful. The geology and colors are stunning, but add in the rock art and ruins, and it is a remarkably special place.
Unlike the more accessible paved overlooks of the park, Horse Canyon is a backcountry destination that requires effort to reach. Your options for visiting are deep sand hiking or deep sand 4-wheel driving. Hiking would be strenuous! If hiking, most don't get much beyond Paul Bunyan's Potty. The upper reaches of Horse Canyon, which I thought were particularly worth visiting, would be 7-9 miles ONE WAY from the trailhead. That is too far for most as a day hike. If you have a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle with low range, driving is an excellent option, and what we did.
The challenge to driving is that much of the road is deep sand. Reducing tire pressure can be very helpful. Depending on the time of year, the road can also have some sections of water. We visited in the winter, when cooler temperatures and a bit more moisture made the sand quite firm. In winter conditions, the road still required 4-wheel drive in a few places but was easy and did not require reducing tire pressure. High summer will generally find softer, drier sand and more flash flood potential. Visiting in the summer heat via vehicle is doable, but the side hikes won't be very pleasant.
Human History
Horse Canyon is often described as an "archaeological epicenter" because it preserves evidence of human occupation spanning thousands of years. The park service has an introduction to the archaeological history of the area:
Traces left behind by the early inhabitants of these canyons give us important clues about who they were and how they lived.
Rock Art
Rock Art styles and motifs differed among cultural groups. The meaning of the drawings is unknown.
Barrier Canyon style rock art features ghost-like figures, often accompanied by small birds and animals. Archaic Indians, hunter-gatherers who roamed this area as long as 8,000 years ago, painted these mysterious images.
Much of the rock art found here is Fremont style, characterized by shield figures and elaborately decorated human torsos and faces. The Anasazi Indians who lived here from approximately A.D. 1050 to A.D. 1200 may have copied motifs and styles from the Fremont Indians, who occupied central Utah during the same period. The Fremont apparently never inhabited these canyons, and their exact relationship to the Anasazi is not known.
Pottery
Pottery is commonly used to determine which cultural group inhabited an area.
Different Indian groups had distinctive methods of tempering, firing, and decorating their pottery. Almost all of the pottery found in this part of Canyonlands is Mesa Verde Anasazi style black on white and corrugated wares. Fragments of pottery are known as “potsherds.”
Ruins
Ruins can tell us how people lived and adapted to the land around them.
All of the structures studied in the Salt Creek Archeological District were built by people of Mesa Verde Anasazi origin. However, the small ruins scattered throughout these canyons are very different from the large villages found at Mesa Verde. An abundance of granaries (storage structures) indicates that the Salt Creek area was used for intensive farming. The low proportion of dwellings suggests that the area was only seasonally inhabited by people who had more permanent habitations to the south in Beef Basin.
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