Newspaper Rock

Newspaper Rock is a single panel of sandstone, but it holds one of the densest concentrations of rock art in the American Southwest. On a vertical face of Wingate sandstone about 200 square feet in area, beside Indian Creek in southeastern Utah, more than 650 figures crowd against each other: deer, bison and pronghorn, human figures, riders and a host of abstract symbols whose meaning is lost. The cliff is coated in dark desert varnish, a thin mineral film built up over centuries, and each figure was made by pecking through that dark skin to the pale rock underneath, so the images stand out almost like print on a page.

The panel is not the work of a single people or period. Carving began roughly at the start of the Common Era and continued through the Archaic, Basketmaker, Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan periods, up to about 1300 CE; later, in historic times, Ute and Navajo people added their own marks, and so did Anglo settlers. Riders on horseback, which could only have been carved after horses reached the region, appear among much older figures. The layering makes the panel a record of successive visits spread over many centuries.

In Navajo the rock is called Tsé Hane', usually translated as "rock that tells a story". It was designated a Utah state historic monument in 1961 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and it now lies within Bears Ears National Monument, cared for by the Bureau of Land Management. The panel sits at about 6,080 feet, where the road runs along Indian Creek; the older images are the darker ones, while the lighter, fresher marks are the more recent, many attributed to the Ute, who still live in the Four Corners region.

Getting there

The panel stands beside Utah State Route 211, the road to the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park, about 12 miles (19 km) from US Highway 191. The nearest towns are Monticello, about 28 miles (45 km) away, and Moab, about 53 miles (85 km) to the north. The nearest airport is Canyonlands Regional Airport (CNY) near Moab, about 88 km away in a straight line; larger airports serving the region are farther off, such as Grand Junction in Colorado. There is a paved car park with toilets, and a short gravel path leads to the panel and its interpretive signs; a car is essential.