August 30, 2026
After having carried a heavy pack 18 miles on a bum leg in the two days prior in Henry’s Fork, I wasn’t up for any long hikes but I did want to spend some time outdoors on my birthday. Chris borrowed a car and drove to my house on Sunday morning, where we hopped in my car and headed into Nine Mile Canyon. We first stopped at a petroglyph panel that I’d spotted from the road about four years earlier that I didn’t think I’d seen before, but I didn’t take the time then to climb up and get a closer look. Even after seeing it up close on this trip it didn’t seem familiar, but just now while writing this I did a quick search of my photo archives and it turns out I actually have been there, back in 2015. I guess the older I get, the more fun I can have in Nine Mile because I’ll have forgotten all about the things I did and saw decades earlier! 😀 Anyway, this was an interesting site with some large, long-necked bighorn sheep and a few human-ish figures holding some round objects (probably shields?).
Next, several miles down the road, we hiked up a ridge and looked for some granaries I’d read about in a book. Not knowing exactly how the granaries were situated, I’d stopped on the road a couple of times on previous trips and searched for them using binoculars, but with that failing, it was clear we needed to actually scramble around in the cliffs to find them. We got up to the base of the first cliff band and we each went a different direction, but neither of us saw any granaries. There was no easy way to get up to the next level without going back down to the canyon bottom and then up a side canyon for a distance before scrambling back up a couple of levels, and neither of us really felt like doing that. We did find a couple of small petroglyph panels so the effort wasn’t completely in vain.
From there we sought out some petroglyphs that I’ve seen before, and Randy had been there as well but on another trip he wasn’t able to locate them from memory and thought maybe a rockfall had taken out the glyphs. I’m happy to report that the panel is still there!
The last stop I planned was at a panel that, a year earlier, I noticed below me after I’d already climbed up above it and didn’t want to lose the elevation. After returning this time and getting a closer look, I realized I’d already been there. Once again. 😀 One part of the panel is very unique, with a deer and what I suppose is a long, forked tongue reaching out to a bighorn sheep over a foot away.
For the rest of the trip we drove down as far as Cottonwood Canyon before turning around and heading back to Price. We made a couple more stops where I pointed out some of the better rock art (that I could remember) to Chris. There was one panel I was looking for–a Ute horse rider with a long headdress–whose location I couldn’t quite remember. We never did spot it but after returning home I looked up its location from a previous trip and committed it to memory so I could stop there in the future if I needed to. Even though we spent a good half a day in the canyon, I took probably the fewest photos of any trip I’ve ever done in Nine Mile–only 44!
Photo Gallery: Nine Mile Canyon L