Preservationists: Gas drilling threatens carvings

By MIKE STARK

WELLINGTON, Utah - Along Utah's Nine Mile Canyon lies what some call the longest art gallery in the world — thousands of prehistoric rock carvings and paintings of bighorn sheep and other wildlife, hunters wielding spears, and warriors engaged in hand-to-hand combat. But now, a dramatic increase in natural gas drilling is proposed on the plateau above the canyon, and preservationists fear trucks will kick up dust that will cover over the images.

And they worry that one possible solution — a chemical dust suppressant — could make things worse by corroding the rock.

"They're irreplaceable," said Steve Tanner, a member of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, which wants more done to funnel industrial traffic away from the canyon to protect the art on the sandstone walls. "When they're gone, they're gone."

The more than 10,000 petroglyphs have been a source of fascination and speculation since their discovery in the late 1800s. The art is believed to be the work of the Fremont people, who lived in present-day Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Nevada from 700 to 1300 A.D., and the ancestors of modern-day Ute Indians.

(The canyon — a mix of private and public land — is actually 78 miles long; it might have gotten its name because a cartographer for the 19th-century explorer John Wesley Powell used a nine-mile section in mapping the passage.)

The federal Bureau of Land Management has pronounced it "the greatest concentration of rock art sites" in the country.

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