While I was in Alaska, my sister Sara sent me a few pictures of petroglpyhs that are found on the west side of Utah Lake.  Naturally, I was very curious and planned to visit the area when I was back in town.

It is obvious that this area used to be a popular target shooting destination.  We found tons of hollow shotgun shells and bullet casings almost everywhere we explored.  The BLM (Bureau of Land Management) has since closed this area to target shooting to protect the area and also protect the petroglpyhs.  If you want to target shoot, the BLM states you can go to Soldier Pass Road just south of mile marker 16.

My mom, sister, and I went down one day to try and find the petroglpyhs in the Lake Mountains area.  It was a lot of fun walking all over in the hopes of finding petroglyphs!  But, it got discouraging at times but my family has always loved rock art and exploring new places so this was fun for us!

There are apparently lots of petroglyphs and they are scattered all over small rocks and boulders on the hillside.  They are hard to find and after an hour or two we only found a few.  The ones we did find are very interesting and could easily be passed over due to many of the petroglyphs are on flat rocks on the ground.

There aren’t any trails to the petroglpyhs so you basically just explore and hope to find them!  With the three of us, I would expect us to find lots more but they are very well hidden and spread around.   If you have a few hours that you want to explore and petroglpyh hunt then this Trek is for you!  Just make sure you wear long pants and shoes that you are OK with getting tons of weeds stuck in them.  My shoes were caked with sharp seeds and it literally took me 2 hours to get them all out!  I’m not joking!  It was awful!

Some of the petroglpyhs we found were just markings like squiggles or simple shapes.

The line on the rock in the above picture pointed to some petroglyphs where my sister is standing.

One of the information signs state that these petroglyphs were created up to 4,000 years ago!  Archaic and Fremont peoples made the rock art and left it for us to find thousands of years later.  I wonder what they mean…

We also found some inscriptions – who knows how long ago those were made!

We call this one the “wiggly man”.

A hand that looks like it has five fingers but no thumb.