Round Trip Distance: 1.5 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 5735 - 5828 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 2 hrs.
Trailhead: 38.56220, -108.08376
Fee: none
Attractions: rockshelter, petroglyphs
The Harris Archeological Site is located in an unnamed canyon in the foothills of the Uncompahgre Plateau about 7 miles west of Olathe, Colorado. The site, which was excavated around 1987, includes a small rockshelter and a handful of petroglyph panels.
For turn-by-turn directions enter 38.56220, -108.08376 into your driving app. This will get you to where the Powerline Road crosses the West Transfer Road. From there you can either begin hiking, or drive, down the steep Powerline Road and continue hiking on the trail that follows the wash into the shallow canyon.
As the trail heads up the canyon it crisscrosses the wash several times. On the day that we were there the trail was carpeted in places with fresh elk scat.
The first petroglyphs that we noticed were a few hundred feet before the Harris Site. Here there is a figure wearing a big hat and what looks like a large round necklace. On the right is a horse with a very small head. A bridal can be seen on the horse and possibly a saddle. It looks like there might be a saddle horn but stirrups can't be seen. Look closely at the mans face and you can see at least 1 eye and a handlebar moustache. We wondered if what looks like a necklace might be the barrel of a gun.
The Harris Site begins a few hundred feet on around the bend. The rockshelter is beneath the shallow overhang to the left of center in this photo. The first petroglyphs are easy to spot on the cliffs to the right before the rockshelter. More petroglyphs can be found on up the wash a few hundred feet beyond the rockshelter.
Most of the images look like tool marks, or sharpening grooves, that form various shapes.
Being cut deep into the rock the images show up pretty well. They are even visible from the wash of the canyon.
Someone carved their initials into the rock barely missing several of the images.
One thing that is especially interesting is that this figure appears several times at the Harris Site and several times at the Painted Cliff Site a couple of miles away. It might be that it is a male anthropomorphic figure with bent arms and legs.
There are a few more panels of petroglyphs on the back wall of the rockshelter. Notice the black soot on the roof left by fires that burnt under the overhang hundreds of years ago.
The images in the rockshelter are the same style as the ones on the outside of the shelter. There is a faint patch of more traditional pecked images below the grooved images that you might be able to make out.
At the next spot up the wash there are a few more tool marks and what is either a wikiup or teepee scratched on the cliff. Judging from all the branches projecting out the top of the image it is probably a wikiup. There is also a faint anthropomorphic image.
The last location up the wash has more tool mark images. To the right of those are a couple of cougar tracks and to the right of those there is an image of a bighorn sheep.
Below that long panel is what looks like a snake.
