The Blythe Intaglios: Figures Meant Only to Be Seen from the Sky

About fifteen miles north of where you are, in the Colorado Desert, there are enormous figures scraped into the surface of the earth. They are so large that for most of human history, nobody fully saw them.

The Blythe Intaglios were first recorded in Western archives in nineteen thirty-two, when an Army Air Corps pilot named George Palmer happened to fly over the right mesa while traveling between Las Vegas and Blythe. He looked down and saw something impossible: a human figure nearly one hundred seventy feet long, arms spread wide, scraped into the desert pavement by someone removing the dark surface rocks to reveal the lighter soil beneath. Palmer circled back and found more figures, animals and geometric shapes arranged on two nearby mesas.

There are six figures in total, in three separate groups, all within about a thousand feet of each other. The largest human figure stretches one hundred seventy-one feet from head to toe.

Archaeologists generally date the Blythe geoglyphs to somewhere between four hundred fifty and two thousand years ago, though the techniques used to make them may be far older. The Mohave and Quechan peoples of the Colorado River region, who were consulted by researchers in the twentieth century, identified the large human figures as Mastamho, the Creator of Earth and of Life. The animal figures represent Hatakulya, a mountain lion figure who played a role in creation.

The figures were added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-five. They are now fenced to protect them from off-road vehicles, but they remain visible from the air.

Blythe itself was named for Thomas Blythe, a British developer who came here in eighteen seventy-seven and staked water rights on the Colorado River, recognizing that control of water in this landscape was control of everything.