Alberta - The Impossible Pictographs of Grotto Creek Canyon
A bit of red ochre on the wall of a canyon is the gateway to an unsolved mystery.
EPISODE NOTES
Some people criticized this episode for calling more attention to the pictographs which might in turn result in more awful behaviour like the kind mentioned in the episode. It’s a fair criticism. Just to give context for my decision to do so:
The pictographs are referenced quite freely when you google ‘grotto creek canyon’, it’s not like they were unknown before this.
Members of the Stoney Nakoda do guided tours of the canyon which include showing the pictographs, so I took my cues from them that they are OK with people knowing about them.
I was careful in the edit to never provide a specific location for the pictographs or show them on a map to ensure that people would not be able to find them based solely on this video.
Someone commented that they thought it was a travesty that these pictographs had not been professionally removed with the chunk of rock around them to be put in a museum. It was interesting to see that kind of clearly well-meaning but wrong-headed response. But the real reason I mention it here is because someone then took the trouble to very kindly and respectfully explain why that wasn’t a good solution and some of the issues around it. Any time I see a productive back-and-forth over a contentious issue online that doesn’t instantly devolve into straw-manning or name-calling, I get a little jolt of hope.
In stark contrast to that: someone told me I was being ‘dishonest’ by claiming that I had found the pictographs on my own. Which was weird because I actually make a joke in the video about how I very specifically did not find them on my own. I pointed that out to this person, and they doubled down, saying that I ‘dishonestly’ claimed that I didn’t see them the first time, but that I had then seen them ‘the second time’ (there was no second time). It didn’t have the vibe of getting trolled, it just felt like I was in the crosshairs of a very grumpy old man who had put his foot down and would do whatever it took not to lift it. So I did what I should have done in the first place and left him to it.
TRANSCRIPT
Thirteen kilometers downstream from Canmore, Alberta, on the path of the Bow River, along a power line trail and just past a growling magnesium oxide manufacturing facility you come to this: a wide, rocky valley tapering to a narrow entrance.
This is Grotto Creek Canyon. A passageway through the rock carved by glacial meltwater at the end of the last ice age, leaving smooth and flowing stone walls up to sixty meters tall.
It’s easy to get so swept up in the beauty of the geology that you flat-out miss the most mysterious bit of the whole canyon. I should know, that is exactly what I did.
Near where the canyon first narrows at the south entrance, four to five meters up the stone wall, you might just be able to make out faded figures in red ochre. They’re pictographs, painted between 500 and 1300 years ago.
Now pictographs in mountainous regions are pretty uncommon. When they do occur it’s often in a place like this: a narrowing point where travellers are funnelled from one place to another. It’s thought that they’ve always been sacred spaces, a spiritual as well as physical passageway.
So these pictographs were already a rare sight. But when they were found by Western archaeologists, they had no idea just how strange they were.
In fact, it took five people and almost half a century to get there. In 1955, Douglas Leechman publishes a preliminary description of the site. That leads to Selwyn Dewdney visiting in 1962 and making an accurate sketch. And that leads to Dr. Thelma Habgood visiting in 1967. Now, she is the first one to make an unusual observation.
The figure she focuses on is this guy, up in the corner. He bears a striking resemblance to Kokapelli (Kookopölö), a flute-playing trickster. Why’s that unusual? Because Kokapelli is only associated with the Hopi, a nation who may have originally migrated from South America, but never settled much further north than what is now the four corners region of the US - 1500km away from these pictographs.
In 1992, Michael Klassen photographs the site on a conveniently rainy day when the wet stone helps the pictographs to pop, and reinforces the figure’s resemblance to Kokapelli.
And finally in 2001, photographer Jim Henderson uses night photography and polarized light to get the clearest images yet. They seem to confirm the theory: this was a figure from the Hopi tradition. So… how on earth did it end up in Grotto Creek Canyon?
There’s a tempting explanation in Hopi oral history. They tell of a great push for exploration and agriculture. Four clans were sent in the four cardinal directions. The Flute Clan headed north and reported back that they’d travelled to ‘a land of rock and snow’ before being forced back by the frigid climate.
So - that is tidy and enticing. And it’s possible we’ve got our answer. But, we may never know for sure. There are other possibilities. The resident Stoney Nakoda could have travelled south, encountered the Hopi in peace or conflict, and come back with their pictographs. They may have been taught. But pictographs were also considered spoils of war, powerful symbols to be taken from a vanquished enemy and wielded by the victors.
So what do the Stoney Nakoda themselves say? Well, some say they know exactly where the pictographs came from - but they’re not talking. Hard to blame them, they were left out of most of the discourse around the mystery even though they’d be most likely to have some insight.
And their reluctance has proven to be well-founded. In July of 2022 a group of hikers stopped at the pictographs… to scratch them up with their walking sticks. Not even for a photo or to try and take a piece of them. Just to desecrate and destroy.
So. Maybe this mystery staying a mystery is OK. Every once in a while we need a reminder that it’s a viable option to speculate, and appreciate, and respect… and just leave things be.