A narrow canyon shimmers in the heat of Indian summer. Broken walls of caramel-colored rock rise hundreds of feet into a sky of intense, clear blue. A small stream, bordered by head-high bunch-willows, sings through sparse pocket meadows. Even at noon, maroon shadows lie deep along the bases of the cliffs. A canyon wren lets its song fall down, down, down toward the canyon floor. This is merely a lonely canyon, beautiful and tranquil, like so many in the intermountain West, dreaming in the sun of days gone by.
But this canyon is different. There is a definite feeling of being watched. Half-hidden by a screen of willows, a man wearing the antlers of an elk peers out. A diminishing line of bighorn sheep follows a crack in a rock face. A huge snake, twenty feet long, undulates along a ledge a hundred feet up. From a perch higher than a ten-story building, two cranes can be seen, rigid and still.
These are the rock-art spirits of the Northern Paiute, and they have haunted this isolated canyon since the artists who created them disappeared, long ago. From some vantages, hundreds of these spirit images can be seen. The eye picks out one, then another and another of these creatures, which appear where least expected. Some of the images show creatures still present in the canyon today--deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, small birds. Sadly, others depict animals that vanished with the fading of the Paiute--wolves, turkeys, bighorn sheep, buffalo.
But there are stranger images than those of animals. Dancing on the cliffs can be found bizarre, shrouded figures with snaky arms and legs--and humanoid creatures crowned with sunlike and moonlike heads, or wearing the heads of wolves, birds, and bison. Many of the figures appear to be reaching out to the animals.
Were the strange figures attempts by the Paiute at sympathetic magic, by which the artists hoped to bring game animals under their control? Or were the images simply a celebration of the creatures of the canyon? Perhaps we shall never know. The thousands of images, both familiar and strange, stare down at the visitor, filling the canyon with an odd feeling of then-time and now-time, a shimmering of reality and unreality come together. The Canyon of Ghosts stands lost and dreaming of times now forgotten. Can you read its message? Can you see its ghosts?
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