In this month’s Canyon Commentary, author Scott Thybony takes us into the remote Lukachukai Mountains on the Navajo Nation. He’s come here to explore a 1,500-year-old ruin with rock art that features hundreds of mysterious painted handprints.
Certain places have a way of setting us adrift. A rattleboard road takes three of us toward the Lukachukai Mountains and into a region empty of all but a few homesteads. We pass a dune field where the sand has migrated, burying roads, and find that even the names on the maps have shifted over time.
We’re on the way to meet a Navajo who will show us places he explored as a boy. Tony Williams navigates as I drive, while Scott Milzer stares out the window fascinated by the clear skies. Having just flown down from Seattle, he hasn’t seen the sun for two months.
By mid-morning we reach a sheep camp where an American flag flutters over a hogan near a tree beginning to leaf. Immediately a pack of friendly dogs appear, animated by our arrival. They know something's up. Vince's nephew, Darrell, exits the hogan and opens the corral gate. The sheep funnel out to be met by the designated sheep dogs, all trained to herd by their mother. The others climb in the back of a pickup.
We follow Vince along a sandy track where walls of red sandstone press close. Soon he points out a line of hand-and-toeholds angling up a cliff in what he calls an escape route. Every bend of the canyon wall reveals another route or rock shelter once used as a hideout by the women and children in times of danger.
Farther up canyon we stop at a plug of eroded sandstone called, “Woman-Walking-Fast-Wrapped-in-a-Shawl Rock.” Using binoculars, I scan an alcove high in the cliffs above and spot a masonry wall and a large pictograph of a human figure. At first it appears inaccessible, then I notice carved handholds leading to an upper ledge. Vince says the lower section of the route has collapsed and tries to discourage us. But we decide to take a closer look.
Working up a talus slope we reach the bottom of the cliff, now undercut. After we make several attempts to scale it, Vince steps in and braces himself against the rock face. His nephew turns his ball cap backwards, then climbs up his uncle’s back and stands on his shoulders.
He reaches the first set of carved handholds and pulls himself up, showing us how to do it Navajo style. Once he rigs a handline, the rest of us are able to make the climb. This takes us to a narrow, sand-and-brush covered ledge, which we traverse one by one placing each foot carefully. A misstep would be fatal.
Where the ledge ends another pitch requires a bushwhack through juniper branches to reach the top. With the hard part behind us, we follow a broad ledge to the site. Left back at the trucks far below, the dogs begin to howl. “They miss us,” says Vince.
We find the ruin in a state of suspended collapse, tucked into a broad pocket streaked with desert varnish. A couple of hundred painted hands fill the backwall with hues of red and yellow ocher. Laid out in crowded rows the handprints give an impression of strength in numbers to anyone passing by. Set off in a niche by itself stands the white figure we saw from below painted in a herringbone pattern. Up close it’s more difficult to see than from a distance. “You get too close,” Milzer says, “and it breaks into pixels.”
As we inspect the site, the nephew tells us we’re the first white men to reach it. No one else, I guess, thought about using an extra body as a ladder. The rock art images date back 1,500 years or so judging by the style, but their purpose remains elusive. Meanings disappear over time the way drifting sand has buried the old roads, leaving an air of mystery. For some of us that’s enough.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and air on the last Friday of each month.
