The Spirit of the Ancients Rise up in opposition to the Hydrocarbon Highway planned for their ancient rock art sanctuary - Click for larger image (https://jamesmcgillis.com)

Utah, the BLM and Uintah County Plan to Desecrate Sego or East Canyon, Utah

The ancient site known as Sego Canyon is an easy day trip from Moab, Utah. The name "Sego Canyon Petroglyphs" is a bit confusing because the main panels of petroglyphs and pictographs are actually located in Thompson Canyon. From Thompson Springs, Utah, take Utah Highway 94 North, which becomes BLM 159 (Thompson Canyon Road). Accessible with any automobile, the gravel road will lead you to the unpaved parking area adjacent to the “Sego Canyon Rock Art” site, as Google Maps identifies it. You may access the main panels from the parking area at 39°01'05.3"N 109°42'37.2"W.

Sego Canyon itself begins north of Thompson Springs as a fork of Thompson Canyon. Unless you prepare ahead for off-road recovery and dry camping in the wilderness, do not drive any farther up Sego Canyon. In many places, it either crosses the streambed or utilizes the streambed as its roadway. There are no fresh water sources and the road is subject to flash flooding. The trail dead-ends at a defunct mining site, along the southern border of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation.

In the year 2014, the sanctity and solitude of Sego Canyon faced imminent demise. For eleven thousand years or more, most early human visitors either painted or carved their visions into the walls of Sego Canyon. The result was a series of interesting and illustrative panels unsurpassed in all of the American West. Undaunted by its sacred and serene beauty, the Grand County Council planned to put a stop to all of that.

At that time, all three options in the long-term usage plan for Grand County Public Lands called for a fifteen mile long, one or two mile wide transportation corridor straight up Sego Canyon. Commonly called the “Hydrocarbon Highway”, this newly paved and widened road would serve a Mecca of tar sands mines planned on property controlled by State of Utah School and Institutional Lands Commission (SITLA). Unless SITLA and Grand County agreed upon this blatant industrialization of the desert, they would have no access to the tar sand deposits that lay beyond the rim of the Book Cliffs.

Public outcry, both in this blog and throughout the country shamed the Grand County Council into abandoning their reckless plan. Even so, less than five years later, the Grand County Council has revived its draconian plan. After the embarrassment engendered by their callous and uncaring plan finally receded in local memory, several agencies charged with protecting our ancient heritage sites again wish to desecrate them. As the price of crude oil continues to rise, tar sands will become ever more competitive in the marketplace. As prices now rise in 2019, even the local Native American tribe hopes to make the Hydrocarbon Highway plan a reality.

Under the current administration, former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke laid waste to nearby Bears Ears National Monument. At its inception in 2016, Bears Ears consisted of 1.35 million acres. After Zinke had his way with it, only 201,876 acres remained under full federal protection. After disgraceful manipulation of both federal lands, and the budget of his agency, in January 2019, “Slinky Zinke” slithered away into a hoped for obscurity.

Yet, like The Terminator, of movie fame, Zinke reemerged from his lair in April 2019. This time, he was a newly minted executive and board member of Nevada based U.S. Gold Corp. Their tag line is, “World-Class Projects in Mining Friendly, U.S. Jurisdictions”. Zinke's compensation package included salary and stock valued at more than $100,000 and “expenses” of $120,000 per year. After draining his federal budget to support a lavish and questionable jet-setting lifestyle, Zinke can now spend at a similar rate in the private sector. Although forbidden from lobbying his former agency, U.S. Gold Corp. CEO Edward Karr cited Zinke’s “excellent relationship” and “in-depth knowledge of the governmental regulatory and permitting process for mining and exploration companies”. These relationships and knowledge with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Interior Department were included as justifications for his hiring.

Succeeding Zinke in April of 2019, David Bernhardt joined the current administration as its new Secretary of the Interior. After working within the Department of Interior for many years, Bernhardt had more recently served as a lobbyist for the extraction industries. During his tenure as a lobbyist, Bernhardt's clients included Halliburton, Cobalt International Energy, Samson Resources, and the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
In other words, Bernhardt is fully in the pocket of Old Energy, as represented by oil, gas and most of all, the “Clean Coal” industry. Get ready for Mr. Bernhardt to push for full-scale development of tar sands in the State of Utah. Although Zinke cannot lobby his former federal agency, there are no restrictions on his lobbying the State of Utah School and Institutional Lands Commission (SITLA).

SITLA owns thousands of acres of potential tar sand mining claims just north of Sego Canyon. If Bernhardt and the likes of Zinke find a way to collaborate tacitly on the extraction of “black gold” from the Sego Canyon tar sands, you can bet that they will. The residents of Grand County, Uintah County and the public at large must remain vigilant. If not, the priceless artifacts and ancient artwork within the Sego Canyon Rock Art site could be defiled.

The rock art images that look down from the walls of Thompson Canyon predate the construction of the Notre Dame Cathedral, which recently burned in Paris. With scientists’ inability to date the earliest pictographs at Sego Canyon, those drawings may predate all human history, including the pyramids of Egypt. No one knows for sure. Anyone who has stood and marveled at the unique beauty of Sego Canyon knows that a paved tar sands haul road would forever alter and destroy this ancient and sacred site.

A high speed haul road similar to the one pictured could be built adjacent to Sego Canyon, the oldest and most sacred of rock art sites in the Southwest (https://jamesmcgillis.com) Who are the people or spirits represented in Sego Canyon? Over the millennia, several types of rock art appeared on the canyon walls, each representing a successive human culture. Some experts claim evidence of human habitation in Sego Canyon dating back to the Archaic Period (6,000 – 2,000 BC). Elsewhere, at the Calico Early Man Site, near Yermo, California, human made material extracted from beneath 100,000-year-old alluvial deposits include a "rock ring". The ring dates back to 135,000 years by thermoluminescence (TL), about 200,000 years by uranium-series analysis, and about 197,000 years by surface beryllium-10 dating. Since there are no adequate ways to use carbon or other dating methods on the earliest Sego Canyon pictographs, their age is indeterminate. For human safety and protection from vandalism, the BLM recently closed Calico Early Man Site to the public. Until adequate funding magically appears, the site will remain off limits to all.

Beginning in an undetermined and ancient age, what we call Barrier Canyon Style rock art panels appeared in Sego Canyon. The Barrier Canyon Style included both pictographs (painted) and petroglyphs (pecked) into the rock surface. Some appear faded and darkened with age, while others have a fresher look and appear similar to red ochre paintings of more recent vintage. The dark, faded and therefore most ancient pictographs often have subtle facial expressions and the appearance of clothing or robes.

In one image, on the far left side of a larger panel is a dark figure, emerging from a grass field. Much like an ancient Sumerian Anunnaki (436,000 BC – 3,700 BC), he wears a dark robe and a spiked or pointed helmet. Obscured by age and weathering, his shoulders and countenance depict him moving forward and to his right. Although small in scale, he represents an apparently giant figure. Scanning down to where his arms might be, he appears to have his hands resting on the shoulders of a much smaller and more humanlike figure.

The smaller figure, superimposed on the lower half of this “Anunnaki Warrior” appears to be walking straight out and into the foreground. He has dark, curly hair and wears a biblical-style flowing robe. Some writings reference the “black headed ones” whom the Anunnaki once ruled. Legend has it that the Anunnaki ruled Gaia, our Mother Earth throughout prehistory. Tired of laboring for the scant amount of gold available on Earth, the Anunnaki developed a slave class, later known as humankind. As gods on Earth, they may have experimented with genetic engineering, including the recombination of their own DNA with that of “Early Man”.

So here, on the walls of Sego Canyon, we have a pictographic suggestion of an Anunnaki god “birthing” Adam into the Garden of Eden. Above the very panel depicting this immaculate birth, are two huge portraits, carved in the stone of the canyon wall. On the left, in profile, is Mother Nature, as represented by a Nubian woman. To her right, intertwined and looking into her face is the classical, white bearded Yahweh, or the “Face of God”. Here, the contrast of a dark and a white face mimics the Anunnaki “Black Knight” and his progeny Adam, a white man with black hair.

As depicted, Yahweh and Mother Nature are in love both with each other and with All that Is. The Anunnaki god, depicted beneath the divine couple, appears to release Adam into what we now know as our own world. After genetic manipulation and creation of humans as a slave class, the Anunnaki lost their final battle in the Pleiadian or the Orion Wars, around 2,000 BC. Upon banishment from Earth, the Anunnaki absconded with Earth’s available gold and returned to their place of origin at Niburu, a brown dwarf planet (or star system) with a highly elliptical orbit around our Sun.

Niburu, also known as “Planet X”, “Planet Nine” or “Nemesis” continues to threaten Earth, as we know it. Niburu has a periodicity that is still in question. Depending on your preferred information source, Niburu returns for a near-Earth dash every 3,600 or 11,000 years. As pictured by scientists and mystics alike, Niburu exists as a huge dark ball of superheated tar. Periodically, as it passes close to the Earth, Niburu is prone to ejecting great swaths of semi-molten petroleum. Old Testament Biblical accounts of fire and brimstone raining from the sky attest to this phenomenon.

As children, we learned a myth about the origins of terrestrial petroleum deposits. Although that myth is widely believed, the petroleum deposits in our Earth did not come from dinosaurs grazing in ancient swampland. Eleven thousand years ago, or at some multiple of that time span, Niburu spewed untold amounts of boiling tar on to the upper reaches of Sego Canyon. As happened in the Bible Lands, so too did the Sego Canyon "Lake of Fire" cool and mix with the desert sands, solidifying and becoming the tar sands, oil and natural gas deposits that we know today. The original "Moabites" were a West-Semitic culture, which flourished in the Ninth Century BCE, or about 11,000 years ago. That time span would coincide with three 3,600 year circuits of Niburu or one major circuit at around 10,800 years.

Remember, the Anunnaki sought to enslave humankind and extract gold for their wealth and pleasure. Old Energy mavens such as Ryan Zinke, David Bernhardt, Edward Karr and the Uintah County Council have their sights set on places like Sego Canyon or East Canyon. Our current day “Anunnaki Wannabes” seek the black gold locked in the tar sands of Sego Canyon. If their self-serving ways prevail, they will build their “Hydrocarbon Highway” straight through Sego Canyon. If so, the ancient depictions of Mother Nature, Yahweh and the Spirit of the Ancients found there and nowhere else shall vanish from the Earth.