Round Trip Distance: 0.6 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 6072 - 6100 feet
Cellphone: 0-2 bars
Time: 30 mins.
Trailhead: Moore Cutoff Road MM 7.7
Fee: none
Attractions: petroglyphs
The Juggler Panel is a petroglyph site located in the Molen Reef area of the San Rafael Swell east of Molen, Utah. The panel gets its name from the central figure which looks a little like that of someone juggling. The Juggler is very close to the highway but most people driving by are unaware that it is there.
The turnoff is along the Moore Cutoff Road through a red gate a short distance east of the more well known Molen Reef Petroglyphs and Dinosaur Tracksite about a quarter mile before reaching mile marker 8.
There is a nice area to park near some big boulders that are a few hundred feet from the panel.
A few faint petroglyphs and pictographs can be spotted on the largest boulder.
There is also a neat rock shelter on the backside of the first big boulder and another rock shelter on the east side of a nearby boulder.
It should be easy to spot The Juggler on a boulder off in the distance from the common parking area.
Some of the detail has faded away but it's interesting to contemplate what the difference in meaning would have been between the images that have a different number of concentric rings and that vary in size. Some literature mentions that concentric circles represent a god but they also appear at calendar sites. If they represent a god in this case it might be that each circle represents a different god assuming they believed in a plurality of gods or polytheism as do the Hopi. Whatever the meaning this panel was once meant to illustrate it's cool to see.
On our visit we actually hiked about a mile and a half just wandering around all the massive boulders before returning to our vehicle.
The only real notable thing that we came across was a rock with some dinosaur bone in it which is not all that uncommon in the Molen Reef.
