Saturday, May 21, 2016
The Big Elk petroglyph on Warrior Ridge.
On our way to spend a long weekend in Salt Lake City so we could attend a concert on Sunday night (that was sadly cancelled), Diane and I met up with our friends Dennis and Alan to explore the rock art of Warrior Ridge in Nine Mile Canyon. I had contacted Dennis a few weeks earlier to see if he was interested in visiting Warrior Ridge and Alan was able to secure permission to cross the private property so we could get access to the ridge. We met up in Wellington on Saturday morning and then drove into Nine Mile Canyon to begin the hike. The drive from Grand Junction to Wellington had been very windy, but once we were in Nine Mile Canyon the wind didn’t seem to be quite as bad.
After finding a place to park the first order of business was getting across Nine Mile Creek. We originally tried to build a bridge across the creek with some wood we found along the bank, but that didn’t work out too well and we ended up just changing into sandals and finding a shallow spot to cross. Then we followed an old irrigation ditch to the base of the ridge where we started climbing to the top. We spent a few hours exploring along the top of the ridge and visited plenty of rock art along the way. When we were on the highest part of the ridge it did finally start to rain and would continue to do so for much of our hike back down. As we neared the road the rain started to come down pretty hard and we all got pretty soaked.
Though the sky looked threatening for most of the morning, we managed to avoid getting wet until the end of our hike.
The view as we climbed the faint trail up the ridge.
Alan leads the way…
We are going that way!
The first big panel we came across was a good one.
Here’s Alan for some scale.
Dennis takes a few photos.
I think this was my favorite panel we saw all day.
Diane spotted this one as we climbed higher up the ridge.
A very nice petroglyph!
Here’s Alan taking photos above the large elk for some more scale.
Dennis noticed the strange black outlines around these?
Nice colors in the rock here.
Dennis and Alan taking in the view from the top of the ridge.
A few claret cups in bloom.
One last view down Warrior Ridge before we started our descent and the rain started coming down.
Excellent photos…I adore that claret cup.
I appreciate you including me the last couple times you went to Nine Mile. Always great to hang out and experience some rock art.
Thanks Dennis! We’ll have to do it again sometime 🙂
Fantastic. I love your work, Randy.
Thank you Dan!