Explore Nine Mile Canyon, Utah

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Nine Mile Canyon is a canyon, approximately 46 miles long, located in the counties of Carbon and Duchesne in eastern Utah, in the Western United States. Promoted as "the world’s longest art gallery," the canyon is known for its extensive rock art, most of it created by the Fremont culture and the Ute people. The rock art, shelters, and granaries left behind by the Fremont make Nine Mile Canyon a destination for archaeologists and tourists alike. Besides the rock art, there is hiking, biking, and exploring the many side canyons (please respect private property). Visitors to the canyon often approach from the town of Wellington, south of Price, Utah. A loop trip is possible by taking the road though Gate Canyon to the town of Myton, west of Vernal, Utah. Facilities include several identified rock art panels; a picnic area, restrooms and historic homestead at Cottonwood Glen; trailheads to rock art panels, hiking, parking lot and bathrooms at Daddy Canyon; and trailheads to rock art sites and a Fremont Village past Frank's Canyon in Cottonwood canyon. The canyon became a main transport corridor in the region during the 1880s. Settlers established a number of ranches in Nine Mile, and even a short-lived town named Harper. No longer heavily traveled, the rugged canyon road was used mostly for recreation and tourism through the end of the 20th century. The discovery of rich deposits of natural gas deep beneath the Tavaputs Plateau has brought an influx of industrial truck traffic since 2002. The large amounts of fugitive dust produced by the trucks' passage may be damaging the rock art. Public debate is ongoing about how best to balance energy development in the canyon against the preservation of its cultural resources. It has been conservatively estimated that there are at least 1,000 rock art sites in the canyon, containing a total of more than 10,000 individual images. The true figures may be ten times as high, but there is no question that rock art is more concentrated here than anywhere else in North America. The majority is in the form of pecked petroglyphs, and there are many paintedpictographs as well. Researchers have also identified hundreds of pit-houses, rock shelters, and granaries, although only a limited amount of actual excavation has been carried out to date. Many of these structures are located high above the canyon floor on cliff ledges, pinnacles, and mesas. They were built by the Fremont, whose presence in Nine Mile has been dated at AD 950–1250. Indeed, Nine Mile Canyon was one of the locations most heavily occupied by the Fremont. In contrast to the purely hunter-gatherer cultures that surrounded them, the Fremont practicedagriculture, growing corn and squash along the canyon bottom. Compared to other Fremont areas, relatively little pottery is found in Nine Mile, suggesting that beans, which must be boiled for hours to become edible, were not an important part of the local diet. The Fremont left irrigation ditches and earthen lodges on the canyon floor that could be seen as late as the 1930s, but are no longer visible after generations of modern cultivation.

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