After finding a gentlemen in Moab with the right facilities to repair our rental car and giving him time to finish his work, Nick and I decided to spend the afternoon hitting a few of the local petroglyph sites. Our first takes us just a few miles southwest of town along the Colorado River. This particular site also has the added bonus of some theropod tracks fossilized in the local sandstone.
Our exploration begins by climbing up a short gravel road leading uphill to a medium sized parking area, which is full of the rock-crawling rigs that Moab is famous for. From the parking lot, we take a short trail, which requires a moderate amount of rock scrambling up the cliff side to a large refrigerator sized sandstone slab that presumable fell from the cliff above at some point in the past. Embedded within the flat surface are two three-toed footprints - unmistakable dinosaur tracks.
Continuing around up and around the cliff on what appears to be a trail of sorts, we find our way to a couple of really nice petroglyph panels. By the style and content, these are thought to be from the ancient Fremont Culture that thrived in this area as long as two millennia ago. The images are mostly a combination of stylized anthropomorphs of humanoids and ungalates. There are a few spirals and other glyphs as well, but overall, it's a very rich site.
We make our way down the return trail and head for the car. I'm still not sure why this is called the Poison Spider site, but that mystery will have to go unsolved for now. There are couple of other sites we are going to attempt to hit tonight before darkness settles in on the red canyons of southeastern Utah.
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