Holbrook, AZ (4/9 & 4/10/2019)

One of the reasons I came to Holbrook was to visit the Rock Art Ranch, as it is called locally.  The owner, a man named Brantley Baird, came here with his parents in 1945 and has been here ever since.  He will soon be 84 years old and looks as fit as someone much younger.  His 3000 acre ranch is sparsely covered with sage brush and not much else.  The grazing is so poor, he can only support 35-40 head of cattle, which doesn't bring in much revenue for a spread that size.  Brantley supplements his income by allowing visitors to tour his "museum" and enter the Chevelon Canyon where it runs through his property, for a fee of course.  I declined the chance to see his museum, but did go into the canyon.

After leading me to the canyon rim, which has a shelter so people can rest and have a picnic, Brantley told me I would be welcome back at any time with no charge.  He even showed me where he hides the key to the gate.  There is a handrail to help people negotiate the stone "stairway" to the bottom, and a kind of sketchy bridge across Chevelon Creek.  I quickly learned to step on the bridge's cross members, since the metal lathe doesn't seem capable of carrying my weight.

The petroglyphs are said to extend about a mile in each direction on both  sides of the creek.  However, high water at this time makes it impossible to go that far without getting  wet.  I saw thousands of figures, but there are many thousands more that I was unable to see.  Based on debris stuck high in the trees, it was evident that the creek has recently been much higher.  Even the bridge would have been under water.

I won't bore you with all the photos I took, but will show only a few of the more impressive or unusual images.

Birthing Scene

Cinderella

Despite not being able to see all the art, the solitude and beauty in the canyon made it a very worthwhile experience.  I'll definitely return when I'm in that area again.

Brantley mentioned the trail ends at a swimming hole, where in the old days they went "skinny dipping".  Now, he says, they can only go "chunky dunking".

Here's a view of the area along the edge of the canyon, complete with an "outhouse" for customer use.

The lady who runs the RV park gave me several ideas of places to visit, one of which is known to locals as The Cracks.  She couldn't tell me how to get there, but I found some directions on the internet.  Turns out it isn't far from the Rock Art Ranch.  

The Cracks is a geologic anomaly caused by salt fields left behind when the area was under the sea.  Eventually covered by thick layers of sandstone, the salt is under great pressure and begins to move and finally starts to dissipate.  The brittle sandstone is no longer supported evenly, so begins to crack.  The process takes millions of years, and is similar to the creation of the arches in Arches National Park.  

The first recorded exploration of The Cracks was in 1891.  An engineer was lowered some 275 feet into a large crack and didn't reach bottom.  Various animal skeletons have been found in some cracks, including those of cattle, camels, hyenas and desert bighorns.  I read there are cracks as wide as twenty feet, but I didn't find any that large.  Covering a four-square-mile area was more than I had time for.

The trail crosses several cracks, going around those too large to easily pass over.