A visit to Indian Creek

The climber swung from a long crack bisecting the Wingate sandstone. He continued to swing high above the ground as his partner worked the ropes to keep him from falling. Even from a distance, Ted and I could hear him call, “I hurt my hand!”
We were hiking in the Indian Creek area northwest of the Abajo Mountains in San Juan County, Utah, looking for Ancestral Puebloan petroglyphs. The area, including Newspaper Rock, was rife with rock art, but it was also world famous for splitter rock climbing. In the nearby parking lot, Ted and I had spotted license plates from New Hampshire, Maryland, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and many more from the Midwest and West. Climbers also came from around the world to experience the remote landscape where cracks, ranging between 17 and 310 feet tall, split the face of the cliffs. The fissures were unusual because they stayed approximately the same width from bottom to top. Some sources say it’s the best rock climbing site on earth, and on that beautiful October morning, many athletes were taking advantage of the perfect weather. Since I have a phobia of heights, I was in awe of those who had clambered up the steep talus slopes to the base of the cliffs, only to start climbing, like Spider Man, up the fissures toward the summits. Some had better luck or skill than others, and my stomach lurched in empathy with the man still dangling in midair.
Indian Creek didn’t start drawing climbers until the 1970’s with the ascent of Earl Wiggins, Ed Webster, and Bryan Becker up the “Supercrack of the Desert.” Instead, for thousands of years, Indian Creek was a corridor and home for Indigenous peoples. At Newspaper Rock, a state historical monument, the huge sandstone face is layered with hundreds of petroglyphs and pictographs from the Archaic, Basketmaker, Fremont, Ancestral Puebloan, Ute, and Navajo people, representing a history of approximately 2,000 years.
The first Euro-American explorers are thought to be Spanish who, in 1765, hunted for silver and tried to find a feasible crossing of the Colorado River. The Macomb expedition was next in 1859 led by Captain John Macomb. They were searching for the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. John Strong Newberry, a geologist, accompanied the expedition and recorded his impressions of the Indian Creek landscape: “On every side we were surrounded by columns, pinnacles, and castles of fantastic shapes. . .. South of us, about a mile distant, rose one of the castle-like buttes. . .. This butte was composed of alternate layers of chocolate-colored sandstone and shale . . . its side nearly perpendicular, but most curiously ornamented with columns and pilaster, porticos and colonnades, cornices and battlements, flanked here and there with tall outstanding towers, and crowned with spires so slender that it seemed as though a breath of air would suffice to topple them from their foundations (Allen, Steve, Utah’s Canyon Country Place Names, Volume 1, 379).
Despite his awe at the beauty, Newberry wrote that the valley was nearly impassable: “The cañon from its many windings and the many branches which open into it, we designated by the name of Labyrinth Cañon [today’s Indian Canyon] . . .. The bottom is occupied with cotton-woods, and thickets of narrow-leaved willow, cane, and salt-bush; all of which, with fallen rocks, quick-sands, and deep water-holes, made the passage through it almost impossible” (Allen, 378).
In 1885, homesteaders, Mel Turner and Don Cooper, undeterred by the labyrinth-like nature of the canyon and thick vegetation, started grazing cattle in the area. They lived in dugouts and established a ranch where the canyon leveled out and where the famed Dugout Ranch exists today. The beautiful ranch has changed hands many times over the years with the Nature Conservancy owning it today (Allen, 229).
A week earlier, Ted had pulled off the highway before we got to the ranch, and, following a trail to Shay Canyon, we hopped over Indian Creek and hiked up into the cliffs where dozens of petroglyphs decorated the desert varnish with bighorn sheep, deer, snakes, a figure with a bow and arrow, geometric shapes, four-armed beings, and Kokopellis. Kokopelli is a complex image, symbolizing, among other things, the spirit of sound. He is also associated with the fertility of humans, plants, and animals, and his music is believed to bring rain.
We didn’t hear haunting flute music in Shay Canyon, but when we returned the following week, rains had come, and Indian Creek had swollen into a river, running high and fast. Ted jumped across, and I handed him his big camera on the end of my walking stick. He wanted to photograph more petroglyphs along the cliffs, but Kenidee, our little schnauzer, and I decided not to risk the crossing and instead explored the area north of the creek.
When my hubby returned, we drove a short distance to the west and walked down an old dirt road south, opposite of the climbing cliffs. It was from there we watched the climber dangling in midair. Did he, I wondered, feel the touch of God in his brush with death? Or was he simply chagrined because he couldn’t finish the climb?
Obviously, with thousands of years of petroglyphs preserved along Indian Creek, it’s a sacred landscape where, as Mircea Eliade proposed in his book, The Sacred and the Profane, the divine “breaks through” into ordinary life. In a strategy much different than the ancient artist pecking out a Kokopelli, perhaps some athletes take on the challenge of extreme sports for those moments of holy clarity. We don’t know if the dangling climber had such a moment of clarity, but with his partner working the ropes, he made it safely back to solid ground.