Etched in stone

      A thousand years ago, summer storms unleashed a barrage of raindrops on the craggy walls of this canyon, south of where Las Vegas casinos glisten in the sun today.
      For generations members of the Mojave, Chemehuevi and Paiute tribes hiked to the remote canyon far from their homelands along the Colorado River and the surrounding desert to seek the rain. There, braving parched, dry conditions with temperatures routinely above 100 degrees, they waited for midsummer showers that would fill natural water tanks, or tenajas.
      "They knew water would be here, and the sheep would smell it and they would come," explained Stanton Rolf, the Bureau of Land Management's district archaeologist, during a visit to the site this month.
      Petroglyphs -- artistic etchings in the refrigerator-size boulders that flank the canyon's steep sides -- depict the importance of desert bighorn sheep to the ancient people. The carvings are different from pictographs, or paintings using ocher -- an earthly clay covered by iron oxide -- that were left by the vanished Anasazi and other tribes on sandstone walls near Red Rock Canyon, west of Las Vegas.
      To carve just one character of the 300 to 500 in the canyon was a tedious task of pecking away at the dark, desert varnish on the basalt outcroppings with a harder stone, in this case probably limestone.
      Etchings depicting bighorn sheep are repeated among the panels.
      These, said Rolf, could mean, "We, the sheep clan people, were here," or it could symbolize reverence the hunters had for sheep. Bighorns were not easy to trap and were difficult to kill using bows and arrows, or spears hurled from a notched stick, called an atlatl.
      Some petroglyphs grace the highest rims of the canyon. Others are close to the gravel of a dry creek bed, where one rock with a shield etching appears to have fallen from a ledge.
      The symbols range from strange-looking figurines with large eyes and big hands to likenesses of plants and animals -- perhaps lizards, birds or rodents -- from the area.
      One panel, known as the calendar man, consists of an oblique rectangle divided into 24 squares. Some are clearly marked with dots in their centers. Next to the rectangle are large and small animal symbols, some linked by squiggly lines.
      "These are not idle doodlings," Rolf said as he plucked an elongated stone from the ground.
      "They would just peck this way," he said, using short strokes to hammer the stone into a larger rock.
      "In one site in the Muddies (Muddy Mountains) we found a hand stone at the foot of a petroglyph," Rolf said.
      Rock artistry was a specialty with the roaming hunters.
      "Everybody didn't do it," he said. "This canyon was probably passed on through oral traditions and songs over several hundreds of years. The same people kept coming back at seasonal times when water was available.
      "It was probably one group, and not for long," he said.
      Although the exact age of the artwork can only be guessed -- based on pottery pieces found at other petroglyph sites on the outskirts of Las Vegas Valley -- Rolf estimates the carvings were left between 800 and 1400.
      Scattered among the rock art are initials and dates left more than three decades ago by modern visitors who used hand tools to chip their marks. Besides these scars, some panels have been vandalized. In some cases rock faces the size of drain covers have been extracted.
      "The site has been looted and vandalized. It has a long history of visitor impacts," Rolf said, referring to a period before the mid-1970s, when the site received national registry designation as a protected, rock art site.
      Rolf said the federal agency intends to pursue a contract for recording and mapping the site. Expanding population growth of the Las Vegas Valley also warrants protecting it and withholding its exact location, he said.
      But with a federal land exchange that would extend urban sprawl nearing completion, government officials now say the site would be best protected if it became a park.
      Four environmental groups in separate protests filed against the proposed Del Webb Corp. land swap south of Las Vegas have objected to the potential impacts on the area with the company's plans to build a community of 26,000 nearby. In two phases, the company intends to acquire 4,756 acres in exchange for an equal value of environmentally sensitive lands across the state.
      Rolf contends the lands involved in the trade are far enough from the site that they are "clearly outside the area of potential effect.
      "What we envision for the area is something like a petroglyph park. We would solicit their input on helping to preserve and interpret the site in the form of a site stewardship program," he said.
      "This would be done with the BLM, Del Webb and concerned Indian groups," Rolf said, noting the remote nature of the site has not precluded its degradation.
      Scott Higginson, Del Webb's vice president for government and public affairs, said the company would help work toward preserving the site.
      "We would love to cooperate with any effort to preserve the petroglyphs. They are part of the state's rich and ancient history," he said.
      Richard Arnold, a Southern Paiute who is executive director of the Las Vegas Indian Center, said, "The cultural intrusion to the site is the biggest concern to Indian people. The preferred thing is preservation and protection of the site."
      The land agency is answering the protests including one by the Nevada Outdoor Recreation Association.
      Charles Watson, the association's executive director, said the petroglyph site should be protected by designating it an area of critical environmental concern.
      "This is totally unacceptable to be privatizing anywhere near this," he said, fearing the risk of vandalism is too great.
      "What we did recommend is that this be made an interpretative site with a ranger present. We think that is the only way to stop the vandalism," Watson said.