It's well worth adding a few hours to the trip between Grand Junction and Dinosaur National Monument in order to spend a few moments communing with these spectral, mysterious images – ghostly birds and life-size flutists. The paintings, left as inscrutable messages from the region’s early settlers, create Colorado’s most desolate, haunting gallery.
The images are attributed to two of Douglass Canyon’s first communities: the Fremont Culture, who lived here from about AD 1 to 1300, and the Ute, who lived here from around 1300 to 1881. It was the journal of Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, a Franciscan missionary who came through on the famed Dominguez-Escalante expedition of 1776, that first named this corridor Cañyon Pintado (Painted Canyon).
It’s an unforgiving, arid and dusty stretch, but over the past several years the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has made the self-guided drive much easier to access, with educational signs and maintained turn-offs and trails. Look for green-and-white BLM rods that indicate the sites along Hwy 139.