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Show Buckhorn Wash-ed STONE-AGE Rock ART SAVED FROM VANDALS By Mark Gerard That lady performed a _ miracle,” declared Reed Martin as he surveyed Buckhorn Wash’s restored rock art. The 190-foot-long panel of nearly-life size anthropomorphic paintings decorates a sandstone overhang in the San Rafael Swell. “That lady” is Constance Silver, a renown art conservator from New York City. She restored Grand County’s Sego Canyon cliff art in 1993 and earlier repaired a vandalized panel in Arches National Park. But when Silver visited the Buckhorn Wash panel in Emery pronounced County, she the pictographs “trashed.” Plastered over with graffiti like a New York subway car, the panel was smeared with scores of names and gouged in many places. The forged signatures of mountain men Jim Bridger and Bill Jackson, neither of whom could read or write, were scrawled prominently across the cliff in a paint that didn’t exist during their lifetimes. For a hundred years the Buckhorn Wash artwork was defaced with axle set ERE aan photo by Buckhorn Restoration Project Vandals and passerby had marred and painted over age-old pictographs in the San Rafael Swell. grease, paint, chalk, and bullet holes. The ancient paintings - bug-eyed and broad-shouldered human-like shapes, frequently with crowns or rays above their heads - were in progress before the Egyptians built pyramids. The art is thought to have been created by a prepottery culture of hunter-gatherers about 3,000 years ago. A few rock art panels of ghostly red and brown figures are the only history Canyon Indians wrote. these Barrier any experts agree that the Barrier Canyon culture’s paintings are far more aes- S thetically engaging than most later pre@ historic art. Ironically, the Buckhorn ™ Wash Barrier Canyon art site’s greatest claim to fame was from being the most @ vandalized rock art site in Utah - and one of the most vandalized prehistoric @ ft sites in the world. w _— Literally, Buckhorn Wash was good g for a bad example. So infamous that a @ French rock-art society named_ itself Association Buckhorn Wash, choosing the Utah site as an example of the modern world’s failure to value the aesthet- ics of earlier cultures. “The panel was just covered with graffiti,” recalled Martin, “When you looked at the panel you saw the graffiti instead of the pictographs.” Years earlier, spurred by Utah’s upcoming 1996 statehood centennial, a handful of Emery County citizens discussed the idea of restoring the panel. The Statehood Centennial Commission had asked each county to initiate a legacy project representing Utah's heritage and the state’s promising future for the next 100 years. But would restoration do any perma- nent good? Would the panel then suffer more vandalism? Local folks formed a committee, the Buckhorn Wash Pictograph Panel Conservation and Restoration Legacy Project, and asked Martin, their gregarious Castle Dale postmaster, to chair it. Martin the Utah Rock research began. contacted a friend in Art Association, and It was not a simple problem. The prehistoric art panel is in Bureau of Land Management territory, in < Wilderness Study Area, and it’s next to an Emery County road. It’s protected because it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and monitored by the Utah Historical Society. Martin quickly realized they would have to get all these organizations to cooperate. Any one of them could torpedo the project. Also, “We knew that just restoring the panel was not enough,” recalled Martin. The Buckhorn Wash site is both remote - 23 miles east of Castle Dale - yet accessible. It was only an arm’s length away from a graded gravyel road. And, though most of the vandalism on the site stopped in the 1970's, visitors have begun to stream into the San Rafael Swell in numbers never before seen. LM’s no Fem official Gnojek says numbers he has of the increase in San Rafael Swell visitors in the past decade, only anecdotal evidence. “Easter has always been crowded at Buckhorn, but now it’s like Easter every weekend.” People are in Buckhorn Wash every day of the week. The Buckhorn Wash road is a northern gateway to the dramatic Swell, but it's deceptively ordinary for miles before the pictograph panel. The stretch is a grey-green table top dotted with cedar trees and carpeted with cat- tle-clipped scrub. The road winds down to the San Rafael River as gently as a wheelchair ramp. Near the pictograph panel, the drive tilts up between buff walls etched with thousands of fine, parallel lines - petrified sand dunes. Broad drips of charcoal, or desert varnish, stain the ancient windswept mounds. A few miles past the Indian art panel, Buckhorn Wash drops away and |