He was walking through a natural travel corridor. This was an excellent place for him to stash extra hunting tools and food in case of emergency, and an easy landmark to remember and describe to kin. The flintknapper/hunter had collected more chert flakes than he needed and was heading southwest to his home. Two of the pouches were stained red by hematite, one of which held chert to make arrowheads the other probably held pieces of this ore. The bag contained three small leather pouches, a water-rounded stone, and marsh-elder seeds. The significant discovery of an old leather bag eroding from sand by visitors in 2005 helped archaeologists piece together a scenario of the Archaic hunter who placed it near the Great Gallery wall. It has been interpreted as a sacred place for Archaic hunters. More recently, geologists date the rock art panel between 0 A.D. As we stared at these red, almost eerie-looking figures, a park ranger quietly came up the path to sit on a nearby fallen cottonwood trunk, as he had almost every day to prevent vandalism. It's a long drive for a short hike, but distances don't matter when standing in front of this incredible wall. until 500 A.D., scientists say, nomadic hunter-gatherers from the Desert Archaic culture used red ochre paint to make pictographs of human-like figures onto the sandstone walls of what is now Horseshoe Canyon. There's a reason Zion gets over 4 million visitors a year: it has the thickest exposure of the colorful and cross-bedded ancient sand dunes that make up the Navajo Sandstone (2,200 feet). It's believed that white sandstone formerly had color but then was "bleached" by ground waters that dissolved iron oxides from the upper heights of the Navajo Sandstone. Hematite is the iron oxide responsible for the saturated reds. The accumulated sand grains get coated with iron oxide. When iron is exposed to oxygen, it produces varying colors and these colors depend on what form of iron oxide is present. The Navajo Sandstone exposed in Zion National Park shows off the many colors that iron creates. If you had to identify one element responsible for the warm colors of Southern Utah, an element that jolts us out of our winter blues and spurs us onto adventure, it would be. Like bees to flowers, we have found our way to Southern Utah many times over the past 20 years and there's so much yet to see. Or we travel to Vermilion Cliffs and Grand Staircase-Escalante areas for adventures in chocolate-brown, pink and maroon sandstone canyons. George and the Zion area, the landscape transforms from hints of pink to to the blazing oranges and reds of Red Mountain Wilderness. Somewhere between Paragonah and Parowan, on our drive southward to St. It's no wonder Fred and I escape the low-energy and dispassionate grays and browns of wintertime Boise to reinvigorate in Utah's red rock country. Orange is the color of warmth, vitality, creativity, and it too increases our activity levels and gives us a sharper awareness of our surroundings. It makes us more sensitive to our environment and invigorates us. It triggers our adrenal gland, causing us to have energy and take action. In color meaning and symbolism, red is a physical stimulant.
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