When you stand at Dead Horse Point, looking out toward the northwest, the vast wasteland of desert you see across is Canyonlands.
Several districts divide the area. There is Needles, Maze, Islands, and Horseshoe.
In one district,Horseshoe, the Great Gallery resides just a short hike from the trailhead, off a little dirt road south of Green River, Utah. It is remote enough to be pristine still, relatively well preserved from vandalism. You can hold your hand up near the rock where the artist placed his medium, many ages ago.
I first visted Canyonlands with the BYU Survival group, so many years ago. We hiked down Horsethief Canyon and around Horseshoe Bend on the Green River, and up the Dirty Devil and Little Muddy for a ways. We camped in potholes and arches in the desert, and got water from alkali springs when there was nothing else. We shared boiled dandelion greens and a shred of flesh apiece from two roasted fishes that we caught between 20 people, and it was the most filling ambrosia you can imagine. We shivered, huddled together through a raging snowstorm, forted up in a rockfall cave that we tried to chink with deadfall cottonwood limbs against the wind as best we could. It was a cold night, with no food, and only one blanket apiece. But we all survived. That was the point. We found out we could endure all manner of adversity.
Just imagine what adversity these people weathered, the painters of the gallery aeons ago, before they finally succumbed to the roving coyotes, and the buzzards and ravens, and the endless burning sun and sand.
