The Pioneer Register: Palimpsest on Sandstone
Near Torrey, Utah
A short walk from the Capitol Gorge trailhead, on a smooth face of Navajo sandstone in a narrow canyon, you can read fifteen hundred years of human presence in one panel.
The earliest marks are Fremont petroglyphs, images incised into the rock between roughly five hundred and thirteen hundred CE: trapezoidal figures, abstract geometric shapes, the signatures of a civilization that farmed this canyon for eight centuries. Then there is a gap in the record. Then, beginning in the eighteen seventies, emigrant names begin to appear.
The emigrants heading west along the Old Spanish Trail and later the Fremont Route scratched their names, their wagon company identifications, and the year into the same sandstone where the Fremont had carved their figures. Some wrote directly over the older marks without apparent awareness that anything was there. Some worked around them. The inscriptions continue into the nineteen forties, a span of seven decades of people passing through this canyon and reaching for the same impulse: to leave a record that they were here.
The NPS has catalogued the register's inscriptions as a historic resource and protects the panel. It is also, viewed from another angle, a document of how land claiming works: each successive group inscribing itself on the surface, the earlier marks pushed into background or worn into illegibility. The Fremont images and the pioneer names share the same stone. Which set of marks you read first, and which you notice, says something about what you came expecting to find.
