Round Trip Distance: 0.8 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 5171 - 5226 feet
Cellphone: 0 bars
Time: 1 hr.
Trailhead: Lower Bradford Canyon Rd.
Fee: none
Attractions: cliff dwelling, pictographs
The Pictograph Ruin in Bradford Canyon is located in the Montezuma Creek area east of Blanding, Utah. All parts of the back wall and overhanging ceilings of the small alcove where the ruin is situated are covered with various pictographs. Most of the images are stylized painted hands, negative handprints, and painted handprints in colors of mostly red, brown, yellow orange, and a single one of white paint.
There are multiple routes that will get you to the Bradford Canyon Pictograph Ruin. On this trip we turned south off of US-191 onto the unmarked Alkali Point Road and followed it for 13.6 miles before turning left onto the Dead Man Canyon Road, CR #2381. Even though the Dead Man Canyon Road is a maintained county road we recommend 4wd with medium ground clearance and dry road conditions. Some spots are steep, others are sandy or rocky, and there are several minor washes to drive across. The smoother option would be via the Perkins and Montezuma Creek roads.
The Dead Man Canyon Road travels across the mesa for a little over a mile and a half and then begins stepping down into the Montezuma Creek drainage. At the 3.6 mile point it reaches an intersection in Bradford Canyon. From here what looks like an uninteresting ruin can be seen across the wash of Bradford Canyon. Hiking down to the wash from this spot looks precarious due to the steepness of the terrain. We opted to follow the road to the left for about 0.4 miles to an easier place of ingress.
That point of entry ended up being a side wash with a hikeable route around a small spillover.
Without a trail to follow a person is left to working out a route via the wash and other paths through the sagebrush and greasewood. Note that we did see a very fresh rattlesnake track in the soft sand above the wash so be aware of that.
The ruin itself, being down low at the bottom of the cliff, is very easy to access. Be very careful though around the loosely stacked walls of the ruin.
A grinding slick can be found on a large boulder just below the ruin.
Pictographs can be seen all along the many facets of the back wall and all surfaces overhead. In this photo the pair of hand prints on the right are the size of a small child.
The ruin itself is much nicer than what it appears through binoculars from across the wash. The use of mortar seems to have helped hold parts of the walls in place.
A handful of anthropomorphic images are mixed in with all the rest. If you look closely at the face of this one you can see a pair of eyes staring back. The object that it is brandishing might me an atlatl and it would imply that the person was left handed.
This is one of several negative handprints. They are made by placing the hand on the rock and then spraying paint around it either with the mouth or perhaps something like a hollow reed.
Other than a couple of black charcoal images, and a single white hand print, most of the color palette used around the ruin can be seen in this photo.
Yellow hands.
On the ceiling directly above the ruin is a panel of mostly stylized painted hands.
Yet another area covered with images.
The triangular thin lined image might be a teepee. There is enough overlap with other markings to make it difficult, for us anyway, to say for sure. We have seen very distinct teepee petroglyph images along Montezuma Creek.
This part of the road had been graded on the previous day but due to embed rocks here and there it was still a little rough. If you came in via the Montezuma Canyon Road and were able to handle that then you shouldn't have any trouble driving the short distance to here. If you keep following the road past this spot you will reach a gas well just around the corner. After that the road degenerates significantly.
The large cliff dwellings of the Bradford Canyon Ruins are less than a mile away along the Montezuma Creek Road. At this point we have marked our map the location of 36 ruins and rock art sites along the Montezuma Creek Road that are all worth exploring. For us this small ruin with all of its pictographs was a treasured find to stumble across. If you would like to see it for yourself then all you have to do is 'Take a hike'.
