Sometimes you want to see something with your own eyes.

My Dinosaurs in History post includes a link to a web site that discusses an Anasazi petroglyph that looks an awful lot like a dinosaur. Even on the web site, you can tell that the original petroglyph is very, very faint.

It’s on Kachina Bridge, which is in Natural Bridges National Park in southern Utah. So when I learned I would be passing through southern Utah, I thought I had better go and look at the thing myself. Do my due diligence. How could I live near this thing, drive right by it, and not try to get a glimpse?

Getting to Kachina Bridge

Here’s how to get to Kachina Bridge. First you drive to Natural Bridges National Park, which is about 35 miles from the main highway. The road is very good, but it is so twisty, with so much climbing, that the 35 mile drive took us about an hour.

We checked in at the Visitors’ Center and showed our national parks pass. From there, you drive your car around a one-way loop that takes you past all the major overlooks in the park. From the loop, you can park your car and access the trail heads. Kachina Bridge is down in a rocky canyon. The trail is about 1.5 miles round trip, but it’s basically vertical. It’s a combination of stone steps, scrambling over red rock following a trail marked by little cairns, scrambling down red rock faces aided by handrails the park has installed, and, in one case, a short climb down a wooden ladder.

It’s a beautiful hike, but despite what the Defending Genesis web site says, this trail would not be easy to navigate while carrying something bulky such as a ladder. In our case, it was made more beautiful and more perilous by the presence of snow and icy patches.

(By the way, could I just pause here and express how grateful I am for our national parks. Someone has created and maintained a fantastic road to get out to this place, then a driving loop and parking places, and then a trail with carved steps, handholds, etc. Because of all this, I (and even my kids!) are able to access this remote and beautiful spot. Without all this, we would have no reason to go there, no way to get there, and probably no idea that the place existed.)

Anyway, finally we were on the canyon bottom. We followed a gravel path beside a stream, and eventually we emerged and – ta-da! – there was the bridge before us.

Sneaky Petroglyphs

When you first get to the bridge, your natural instinct is to approach it and then walk under it. Consequently, I at first walked right past all the petroglyphs without even noticing them. Or actually, I walked right under them.

The biggest group of petroglyphs is on the side of Kachina Bridge that faces you as you approach it. They are on a relatively flat, vertical strip of canyon wall, about 10 or 15 feet up, with a ledge protruding below them. To get a close look at them, you would need to scale the ledge using rock climbing equipment or a ladder. If you stand right underneath them, the ledge partially blocks your view. So if, like me, all you have is a stupid cell phone camera, you have to back way up and then use the zoom to get grainy “close ups” of the petroglyphs.

Some of these petroglyphs are really famous, but some of the most famous ones are the hardest to see. They are made up of dibbles in the rock which itself has an irregular surface. I imagine that the best time to photograph them would be morning or evening when the slanting light would help pick them out. (We were there at noon.) And to use a professional camera with a good zoom lens maybe.

Me, Trying to Photograph Them Anyway

So I wandered around in the snow and took about a million photos of the different sections of the wall with my cell phone, hoping that I might photograph the dinosaur by accident and be able to find it later. There were so many petroglyphs, and many of them overlapping each other, and I had no idea where in this composite mural the supposed dinosaur might be.

I also took some photographs of the whole scene from a distance to give a sense of context of the petroglyphs.

As I stumped around in the frozen red mud, I thought to myself. These are so hard to get to and photograph. How hard must they have been to make? What would motivate anyone to make all this art (or language) in this hard-to-get-to spot? It’s a similar question to cave paintings. Of course, there is lots of good information out there about what these spirals and zigzags and blocky figures tell us about probable Anasazi cosmology. The only thing I could undeniably tell that the original artists must have been saying, though, was,

“We were here!”

I Did Photograph It! But You Can’t See It

When I got home, I tracked down the web site and tried to identify which section of the wall the dino petroglyph occupied. Turns out I did photograph that section of wall! Here it is.

Of course, you can’t see the dino at all. So I cannot verify that the thing is there. Certainly you can’t see it with the naked eye, from a distance, at noon on a winter day. But then, that goes for many of the petroglyphs.

Further evidence that the dino glyph is actually there: Senter and Cole went out of their way to analyze it and disprove it. They seem to be able to see it, I guess. Enough that it bothers them.

My Kids Trying to Help Me Find the Dinosaur

Sometimes another pair of eyes helps, so before we left I asked my kids (who had spent the previous hour scrambling over red boulders and breaking ice in the stream) to see if they could spot any dinosaur.

They didn’t spot the dinosaur, but they did point out a number of glyphs that could have been dinosaurs (or, from that distance, anything).

Here are some clearer ones on the other side of Kachina Bridge. I don’t know what the situation was like when these were first made, but now, they are on a sheer wall that looms directly over the deepest part of the icy stream.

This one, which a dispassionate observer has called “Chicken Man,” could be a large bird. Or (just a thought here), it could be a T-Rex if we are assuming there are multiple glyphs of dinosaurs. At any rate, the 3-toed, bird-like foot, long neck, and fat body on 2 legs are clearly visible.

This one, which my son suggested as a possible dino, looks more like a giraffe to me, but who knows. Or it could be pure symbol, not meant to represent an animal at all. As you can see, it’s near the giant chicken.

Lesson Learned

So that’s my fail. I can tell you that there is not, on Kachina Bridge, a dinosaur petroglyph that you can’t miss and that unmistakably leaps out at the lay person.

I can tell you that there are many interesting symbols which are hard to discern and need to be (and have been) photographed and analyzed by experts who are familiar with Southwestern archeaology and anthropology.

And that, like everything having to do with ancient man and with dinosaurs, the process of interpretation is more art than science and is hugely influenced by our assumptions.