Canyon Pintado: a thousand years of rock art on the road to Rangely

Drive south from Rangely on Highway 139 and the canyon walls start to do something unusual: they have pictures on them. Canyon Pintado spreads across more than 16,000 acres of public land along about 15 miles of the highway, and the rock holds petroglyphs pecked into stone and pictographs painted with pigments from plants and minerals. Some panels were made by Fremont people roughly a thousand years ago; others are Ute work from more recent centuries. The Bureau of Land Management counts this among the larger concentrations of Fremont rock art in the region.

The name is old, too. In 1776 the Spanish friars Dominguez and Escalante passed through, noted all the painted rock, and called the place Canon Pintado, “Painted Canyon.”

You do not have to scramble or guess to see it. Eight marked sites sit right off the highway, with short trails and signs, and the chamber in town hands out a self-guided tour brochure. One stop, Lookout Point, is a calendar the Fremont carved into sandstone to track the seasons for planting.

These figures have lasted centuries because people leave them be. Skin oils and footsteps wear them away, so look closely but do not touch the panels or climb the boulders that hold them. For the site list and current conditions, start with the BLM’s Canyon Pintado page.