Five Finger Ridge, the village under the interstate
Clear Creek Canyon The reason the park exists Told in the museum
The park exists because of a collision of timing. In the early 1980s, crews were pushing Interstate 70 through Clear Creek Canyon, and some of the fill they needed came off a low rise called Five Finger Ridge. Local schoolchildren had told archaeologists at Brigham Young University that the ridge was scattered with pottery shards and the round depressions of collapsed houses. They were right. Under the sagebrush lay one of the largest Fremont villages anyone had found, and the machines were already at work on it.
What followed was a race against the road. Archaeologists excavated the ridge ahead of the grade, mapping and lifting more than a hundred separate structures that had once held a few hundred people. Then the north end of the ridge went into the highway, the way the plan had always called for. It is a strange, honest story: a village studied in full precisely because it was about to be gone. Utah State Parks describes Five Finger Ridge as the largest known Fremont village, and this is the one place that tells you so, which the freeway signs never will.
Come knowing that the village itself is mostly gone, so this is not a place of standing walls. What you come for is the museum full of everything carried off the ridge, and the canyon around it, which the road spared and which still holds the rock art those villagers left on the cliffs. The state park opened in 1987 to keep both together.
The details
Getting there
From Richfield, take Interstate 70 west toward Cove Fort and leave at Exit 17, then follow Clear Creek Canyon Road about a mile to the visitor center. The park sits right against the freeway, so it is an easy stop on any trip across I-70, and the exit is well signed in both directions.
Before you go
- Do not expect ruins to walk through; the village was excavated and the ridge largely removed, so the museum carries the story.
- Start in the museum before the trails so the rock art outside makes sense in context.
- The nearest gas, food and lodging are back in Richfield; the canyon itself has none.
- The same deep history surfaces again out around Delta, where the Great Basin Museum carries the Fremont and fossil story for the West Desert.
The rock art and the trails that reach it
Canyon walls Paved loop to half-day hikes Best spring through fall
The rock art is the reason the canyon rewards a stop even more than the museum does. The cliffs of Clear Creek Canyon carry hundreds of documented panels, painted pictographs and pecked petroglyphs both, left over centuries by the people who lived on and around the ridge. Figures with broad trapezoid bodies, bighorn sheep, spirals, snakes and rows of handprints run along the rock, close enough in places to read from the trail.
The easiest way in is the Parade of Rock Art, a paved, wheelchair accessible loop of about a third of a mile that leaves from behind the visitor center and passes panel after panel in roughly fifteen minutes. From there the walking gets more ambitious: the Cave of a Hundred Hands is a short round trip out to a shelter marked with painted handprints, and the Rim Trail climbs the ridge to a long run of panels and an overlook down the canyon. In all the park keeps well over a dozen guided trails, so you can spend fifteen minutes or a whole morning.
This is old, fragile work on open rock, and it survives only because visitors leave it alone. The oils on a hand will damage a painted panel, and chalk or water to make a photo pop does lasting harm. Look closely, photograph freely, and touch nothing, and the panels will still be here for the next people who pull off the freeway.
The details
Getting there
All the trailheads are at the park itself; the Parade of Rock Art starts a few steps behind the visitor center, and the longer trails leave from marked lots along Clear Creek Canyon Road. Pick up a trail guide inside and the staff will point you to the panels worth the walk on the time you have.
Before you go
- Never touch a panel; skin oils, chalk and water all damage the rock art permanently.
- The paved Parade of Rock Art loop is the accessible option; the ridge trails are dirt and climb.
- Morning and late-day light rakes the panels and makes the pecked figures far easier to see.
- Carry water; the canyon is dry and exposed, and there is no store past the visitor center.
The museum and its Fremont collection
Visitor center Included with admission Year round
Everything lifted off Five Finger Ridge had to go somewhere, and the museum at the park entrance is where it went. It holds one of the fuller collections of Fremont material anywhere: gray coiled pottery, stone tools and points, bone awls and needles, shell and stone jewelry, small clay figurines and the carved bone gaming pieces that tell you these were people with time to play, not just to survive.
The building does the work the leveled ridge no longer can. Displays reconstruct what a pit house looked like, walk you through how the village was mapped and excavated ahead of the road, and set the objects in the daily round of planting, grinding, hunting and trade. It is a compact museum, an easy forty five minutes to an hour, and it is what turns the rock art outside from pretty marks into a record left by a specific community that lived right here.
Because the collection came from a single, thoroughly studied site, it hangs together in a way few small museums manage. If the Fremont are new to you, start here, read the panels inside, and the canyon walls outside will read like sentences instead of decoration.
The details
Getting there
The museum is the visitor center, so it is the first building you reach off Clear Creek Canyon Road, with parking at the door. Pay the day-use fee here, and this is also where you pick up trail guides and ask the staff which panels are worth your time.
Before you go
- Confirm current hours and the day-use fee at stateparks.utah.gov, since both shift with the season.
- Winter days are shorter and Sundays can be closed, so a cold-month visit wants a phone check first.
- A Utah state-parks annual pass covers the entry if the park becomes a repeat stop.
- It reads well for school-age kids; the reconstructed pit house and the gaming pieces land better than any label.
Who the Fremont were
Farmers and foragers About AD 400 to 1300 Met in the museum
The Fremont were the farming and foraging people who lived across central and northern Utah, and into neighboring parts of Colorado, Idaho and Nevada, from roughly the year 400 to 1300. They are named for the Fremont River, which runs east of here toward Capitol Reef, and they are the northern cousins of the better known Ancestral Puebloans to the south. For a thousand years they grew corn, beans and squash along the creeks and hunted and gathered the country in between.
What sets them apart is a distinctive kit. Fremont potters made a plain gray coiled ware; their basket makers used a rod and bundle technique found almost nowhere else; they wore moccasins rather than sandals, cut from the leg skin of a deer; and they left small, expressive clay figurines and those broad trapezoid figures on the rock. Taken together it is a signature clear enough that archaeologists can point at a site and say Fremont, and Five Finger Ridge is one of the clearest examples they have.
Around 1300 the Fremont way of life wound down across the region, as a drying climate and changing times moved people on and blended them into other groups. They did not vanish so much as disperse, and their descendants are woven into the Native peoples of the Great Basin and beyond. The canyon here is one of the best places in Utah to stand where they stood and read what they left.
The details
How we know
Almost everything above comes from sites like this one: the pottery, the baskets and moccasins preserved in dry shelters, the seeds and bones in old hearths, and the rock art read against them. Five Finger Ridge is important because it was excavated whole, giving a rare full picture of a single Fremont village rather than a scatter of fragments.
Before you read the rock art
- Pictographs are painted on; petroglyphs are pecked in. The canyon has both, sometimes on the same wall.
- The broad trapezoid figures with headdresses are the classic Fremont style; bighorn sheep and spirals are common too.
- Resist the urge to assign fixed meanings; the museum is honest that much of the rock art is not fully understood.
- Treat the panels and the site as what they are, the record of living people, and give them that respect.
Clear Creek Canyon and Castle Rock Campground
The canyon and campground Warm season for camping A base for the corner
The setting is half the visit. Clear Creek Canyon is a narrow, red-walled cut where Interstate 70 climbs from the Sevier Valley toward Cove Fort, and the little creek that names it runs beside the road under cottonwoods. The old highway alignment still threads the canyon as a quiet frontage road, so you can drive or ride slowly under the same cliffs the villagers watched, without the freeway noise.
The park runs Castle Rock Campground in the canyon near the museum, with sites for tents and smaller trailers and a warm-season run of roughly spring into fall. It is a modest, quiet campground rather than a resort, which suits the place, and it turns Fremont Indian from an hour off the freeway into an easy overnight. From a canyon base you are also well set for the rest of this corner of the corridor.
South down US-89 from the canyon mouth sit Marysvale and the striped cliffs of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and the Sevier River runs the whole valley. Fish Lake and its high country are up over the plateau to the east, and Richfield with its services is a short run back northeast. The park makes a natural anchor for a day of it.
The details
Getting there
Castle Rock Campground is signed off Clear Creek Canyon Road near the museum. From the north or east, leave I-70 at Exit 17; from the south, US-89 meets I-70 near the canyon mouth, so the park sits at the hinge between the Sevier Valley and the Marysvale country.
Before you go
- Reserve or check campground status through Utah State Parks before counting on a site, especially on a summer weekend.
- Stock up in Richfield first; there is no store in the canyon.
- In winter, watch I-70 conditions over the mountains; storms can close or slow the interstate on either side of the canyon.
- Pair the visit with Fish Lake over the plateau or the drive down US-89 for a full day.
