Round Trip Distance: 1 mile
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 4846 - 4880 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 1 hr.
Trailhead: 39.26797, -108.25972
Fee: none
Attractions: petroglyphs, pictographs
Sulphur Gulch is the northernmost of a half dozen or so canyons that drain into the Colorado River from the west as it flows through DeBeque Canyon before reaching Grand Junction, Colorado. At the point where the gulch reaches the river there is an island of cliffs that has a few very old petroglyph and pictographs panels of rock art that include both Archaic and Barrier Canyon Style images.
We used a spot along V 2/10 Road, that is about 8.5 miles from the town of De Beque, where it crosses the wash, as our trailhead. For turn-by-turn directions you can enter 39.26797, -108.25972 into your driving app. During dry conditions the roads are all passable by 2WD vehicles with moderate ground clearance.
After parking look for a faint trail that heads toward the wash in the direction of the Colorado River. In this photo the red circle shows approximately where the first petroglyphs and pictographs are located. The red arrow is meaning to indicate that the rest of the petroglyphs are around the point on the river side of the cliffs.
There is an easy spot where you can duck under the railroad bridge.
The first faint petroglyphs include 4 deer or sheep that are easy to make out along with some more images that might also have been the same but are really hard to see.
A little further along the cliff is a small anthropomorphic image.
To the right of that are some washed out pictographs that were done in red and white paint.
Only portions of these are at all discernible.
The rest of the panels are on the river side of the cliffs. As you work your way around the point of the cliffs you will probably notice a few rock shelters. The first images that you come upon include some easy to see deer or elk figures.
The exaggerated antlers of this image seem to impart some special meaning.
Further along the cliff, and higher up, is an easy to miss panel of what look like elaborate Barrier Canyon Style images.
Here is a rough outline to give a better idea of how they look. These might not be BCS images at all but they look more like that than anything else of which we can think. There is a lot more detail to the images than what we outlined that you can probably make out by clicking on the first image and enlarging it.
A little past this panel of petroglyphs there is a nice overhang and beyond that there is a slough where the Colorado River brushes up against the cliffs. It can be gotten around by hiking back almost to the point where there is a gap in the cliffs that a person can scramble up to the top of the mesa and back down to the bottomland a little upstream from the alcove. We hiked around the southern end of the mesa looking for pithouses but didn't explore the half of it.
