The rock art Parowan
Ninety panels, and nobody takes a ticket
Parowan Gap, and the 180 marks on the wall.
Ten miles northwest of town, a wind gap cuts clean through the Red Hills, and both walls of it are covered in carving. More than ninety panels, well over a thousand figures, and one famous glyph that an astronomer and a Paiute elder will describe to you in completely different terms. No fee, no gate, and the sun sets into the notch at the solstice.
Start here
A notch in the hills, and a thousand years of carving.
Parowan Gap is a wind gap: a place where an old drainage cut clean through the Red Hills and left a narrow pass with vertical rock on both sides. Roads have used it ever since there have been roads, and so did everybody before that. The result is more than ninety separate panels of rock art on the walls, carrying well over a thousand individual figures, which makes it one of the densest concentrations in Utah.
Most of it is attributed to the Fremont culture, and some of the carvings are considerably older than that. What is on the rock is human figures, spirals, snakes, lizards, bear claws, mountain sheep and a great deal of geometry, pecked through the dark surface patina into the pale sandstone underneath. It is Bureau of Land Management ground, it is listed on the National Register, and there is no fee, no gate and no visitor centre.
The site matters to living people. It holds meaning for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, whose reservation is headquartered in Cedar City, and for the Hopi, and it is not a ruin or an abandoned artefact. Interpretive signs at the site set out what is known and are careful about what is not, which is more than most rock art sites manage.
Parowan Gap at a glance
90+
separate panels on the gap walls
1,500+
individual carved figures recorded
180
notches on the Zipper Glyph
~10 mi
northwest of Parowan
The famous one
Two readings of the same carving.
One panel gets photographed more than all the others put together. It is large, deeply cut and unmistakable: two arms meeting in a V, with a long row of tick marks running along them, and it has been nicknamed the Zipper Glyph for the obvious reason. Somebody counted the notches and arrived at 180.
That number is what makes the first reading possible. There are roughly 180 days between the summer solstice and the winter solstice, and researchers working on the astronomy of the site read the V shaped baseline as the angle the setting sun traverses along the horizon between those two points, with the tick marks counting the days across it. On that reading, the whole gap is an instrument and the glyph is its key: a diagram of how the notch, the cairns out on the valley floor and the sun relate to one another through the year.
The second reading comes from the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, and it is not a variation on the first. In it the glyph records a migration: a great leader bringing a people through hardship, with the marks standing for the difficulties met along the way, famine and drought among them. It is a story rather than a calendar, and it belongs to a community that is still here to tell it.
I am not going to adjudicate between those, and neither should a page like this. What is worth carrying out to the site is that both readings are held seriously by people who have spent far longer with this rock than a visitor will, and that standing in front of a carving without knowing what it means is a perfectly respectable way to spend twenty minutes.
The interesting thing about the Gap is not that somebody has solved it. It is that two careful traditions look at the same 180 marks and see completely different things, and both are still being argued in good faith.
Why people come at sunset
The sun sets into the notch.
Around the solstices the setting sun lines up with the gap itself and drops through it, which is the sort of thing that sounds like a legend until you watch it happen. Locals drive out with folding chairs and a flask, and there are usually more cars than you expect for a dirt pull out ten miles from anywhere.
The Bureau of Land Management and local volunteers put on interpretive events at the site tied to the solstices, the equinoxes and, in some years, lunar events, with people on hand to explain what is being looked at. Those are the evenings to come if you want the astronomy explained by somebody who knows it, rather than reconstructed from a page like this one.
Dates and times for those events are set year by year and they are not always widely advertised, so the reliable route is to ask the BLM's Cedar City field office or Parowan City rather than to trust a listing. The alignment itself happens whether or not anybody organises anything, and a solstice evening with nobody else there is not a lesser experience.
One thing to know if you go on a solstice: the road out and the pull outs at the gap are not built for a crowd, and on those evenings there is one. Park where you are meant to, do not block the road, and be patient about leaving in the dark.
The road out, and the tracks
Ten miles of valley, then dinosaurs.
From the middle of Parowan the simplest route is north on Main to 400 North, then west, and you stay on that road out across the farm ground for something over ten miles. The inner part is paved and the outer part is maintained gravel, and in dry weather an ordinary passenger car does the whole thing without difficulty. Allow about half an hour each way and rather more if you stop, which you will.
Coming off Interstate 15 instead, exit 75 south of town connects through to the same Gap Road and reaches the site in a shorter run, which is the route to take if you are passing through rather than staying in Parowan.
A separate site a short distance on preserves dinosaur tracks in the rock, three toed and bird like, left in what was mud something on the order of seventy million years ago. There is a small parking area and a short walk to reach them. It is a different kind of old from the carvings and the two together make the drive worth more than either would alone.
The surface is the usual southern Utah caveat. Graded gravel is comfortable dry and unpleasant wet, and this is open valley with no shelter and patchy phone signal. Take water, tell somebody where you have gone, and if the sky over the Red Hills has gone the wrong colour, drive it another day.
Rock art is fragile in ways that are not obvious. Touching a panel transfers skin oil that changes how the surface weathers, and chalking, wetting or tracing a carving to make it photograph better does permanent damage. So does scrambling above a panel and knocking material down across it. Everything at Parowan Gap is protected under federal law and, more to the point, none of it can be replaced. Photograph it, leave it, and report damage to the BLM's Cedar City field office.
Keep reading
More of Parowan on The Local.
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Parowan, from a local
Southern Utah's first town, a notch full of rock art, and a road that climbs 4,600 feet.
Read the pageQuick answers
The Gap, answered.
North on Main Street to 400 North, then west out of town, and stay on that road across the farm ground for something over ten miles. The inner section is paved and the outer section is maintained gravel, and an ordinary passenger car makes the trip comfortably in dry weather. Allow about half an hour each way. Coming off Interstate 15 instead, exit 75 connects through to the same road on a shorter run.
The largest and most photographed carving at the site: two arms meeting in a V with a long row of tick marks along them, 180 of them by the usual count. One reading, developed from the site's astronomy, takes the V as the angle the setting sun traverses along the horizon between the summer and winter solstices, with the marks counting the roughly 180 days between them. The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah reads it instead as a record of a migration led through hardship, the marks standing for difficulties such as famine and drought. Both readings are held seriously.
Yes. Around the solstices the setting sun drops into the notch itself, and it is striking enough that people drive out from town with chairs to watch it. The Bureau of Land Management and local volunteers run interpretive events at the site tied to the solstices and equinoxes, and in some years to lunar events. Dates are set year by year and are not always widely advertised, so ask the BLM's Cedar City field office or Parowan City rather than trusting a listing you found.
Close to it. A separate site a short distance along the same road preserves three toed, bird like tracks in the rock, left in mud something on the order of seventy million years ago, with a small parking area and a short walk to reach them. It is a different order of antiquity from the rock art and the two together are what make the drive out worth doing properly rather than as a quick stop.
Most of the carvings are attributed to the Fremont culture, which occupied this part of Utah for roughly a thousand years before about 1300, and some of the work at the site is considerably older than that. Precise dating of pecked rock art is genuinely difficult, which is why the interpretive signs at the gap are careful about it, and any source that gives you a confident single date for the whole site is telling you more than the evidence supports.
Ten miles of farm road, and nobody takes a ticket.
The Gap is the thing I send visitors to first, and it is also a fair test of whether this valley suits you: if driving half an hour across hay ground to stand in front of something nobody is charging for sounds like a good evening, Parowan probably works for you. If that appeals, let's talk about what living out here actually costs.