The photography in this gallery include the Upper and Lower Sand Island Recreational Area as well as the Kachina Panel (aka Butler Wash Panel) which is a few miles from Sand Island and along the San Juan River. The San Juan River area has supported many populations throughout history and has therefore resulted in a lot of rock art covering a lot of traditions. The Sand Island Recreational Area includes rock art from the Archaic people (Western Archaic Tradition and Glen Canyon Linear), Basketmaker San Juan Anthropomorphic, early and late Ancestral Pueblo, and recent Ute and Navajo. There may also be a panel depicting two Columbian mammoths which would have been created by Ice Age hunter-gatherers. I will discuss this panel later.
Until recently the only area that could be visited easily at the Sand Island site was a long cliff of Navajo sandstone located next to the individual campground. In 2009 the BLM increased the amount of viewable rock art by way of a vegetation restoration project in which at least a half mile of Russian olive and tamarisk was removed from the cliff faces to the east of the group campground and ranger station. Through vegetation clearance these panels became accessible to the public. Images in this gallery were taken in both areas.
A number of years ago a panel with two mammoths was discovered in the area. Ekkehart Malotki, Henry Wallace, and Donald Weaver have been at the forefront of popularizing and explaining the panel. If the mammoth identification is correct the panel would be somewhere around 13,000 years old. While some controversy surrounds the panel the fact that there are actually two mammoths present as well as mammoth features that no forger would likely know supports the possibility that the panel is genuine.
I personally picked up an interest in seeing the mammoth panel for myself in 2012 after reading an article on the Internet that Malotki and Wallace wrote on the subject. I knew of the panel earlier than that since it was discussed in Malotki and Weavers' book Stone Chisel and Yucca Brush which I originally purchased in 2007. To my utter surprise, when I visited the Sand Island area in September 2014 I coincidentally ran across Ekkehart Malotki who happened to be in the area with family. He was able to personally show me the mammoth panel as well as other panels in the Upper Sand Island area.
