Buckhorn Wash, the rock art canyon on the Swell's northern edge

The main figures are Barrier Canyon style, a painted tradition more than two thousand years old, put on the sandstone in red ochre rather than cut into it. Fremont petroglyphs on the same wall are younger. Nobody can say with confidence which modern nation descends from the people who painted here, and the interpretive panels at the site do not try.

Because the wall had been defaced for well over a century. Buckhorn Wash carried a branch of the Old Spanish Trail, so people passed directly beneath the figures for generations, and many of them added names, dates and scratches. For Utah's state centennial in 1996, Emery County residents organized a conservation project with the Bureau of Land Management and state and county agencies, and a professional conservator spent about six weeks carrying it out.

No. A pictograph is pigment sitting on the rock surface, so touching, leaning, wetting, chalking or rubbing it takes some of it away for good and nothing puts it back. A petroglyph is material cut through the dark surface varnish and wears more slowly, but the rule is the same at both: photograph from the trail, add nothing to the wall and take nothing off the ground.

The head of the draw is roughly 45 minutes from Huntington, nearly all of it on graded gravel reached from the Cleveland and Castle Dale side of the valley. The pictograph panel is about an hour from town, and the San Rafael River crossing with the swinging bridge sits about four miles below the panel, roughly an hour and a quarter. There is no fuel, water, shop or phone signal anywhere on the road.

A suspension bridge about 160 feet long that the Civilian Conservation Corps built in the 1930s where the Buckhorn Draw road crosses the San Rafael River. It is Utah's oldest intact suspension bridge and it was the only crossing here until the 1990s. It no longer carries vehicles; people walk it, and a modern bridge alongside takes the traffic. A Bureau of Land Management recreation site with tent pads, tables, fire rings and toilets sits beside it.

Yes. A three toed ornithopod print sits in the Navajo sandstone along the draw, roughly fifteen miles down from the Castle Dale end, signed from the road with a small pull off. It is a single track rather than a trackway, and it is a trace fossil, a record of behavior rather than of a body. Do not pour water into it for a photograph and do not climb the rock around it.

Not in dry conditions. The road is graded gravel that an ordinary passenger car handles at a sensible speed. Wet weather turns it into a different road: the surface gets greasy, washes cross it, and water arrives from country you cannot see well after the sky above you has cleared. If storms are building, turn around rather than press on, because there is no phone signal and recovery is a long way off.

Yes. A Bureau of Land Management recreation site at the San Rafael River crossing beside the swinging bridge has tent pads, picnic tables, fire rings and toilets but no drinking water, and there are other developed sites in the draw. The BLM's review of San Rafael Swell route and camping rules closed in June 2026, so check the current rules rather than plan from an older guide.

At Interstate 70 exit 131, about thirty miles west of Green River, a long way from where a Huntington visitor started. Driven end to end it is one of the better gravel drives in Utah, and it commits you to many miles with nothing on them. As an out and back from Huntington it is a comfortable half to full day, so decide which version you are doing before you leave town.