Welcome to Episode 73 of the Mountain Nature and Culture Podcast. This week, I look into ancient pictographs found in Grotto Canyon, near Canmore, Alberta…and something just doesn’t add up. I also look at how reduced snowpacks can have huge impacts on wildlife survival and distribution throughout the mountain west…and with that said, let’s get to it.
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The Story of the Grotto Creek Pictographs
The first nation’s history of the mountain west dates back some 10 millennia or more. From the moment the glaciers vacated the mountain valleys, the land has been inhabited by diverse groups of people.
As they lived, travelled, hunted, and wandered the western wilderness, they left evidence of their passing for archaeologists to ponder. Ancient firepits and tipi rings showed former camping sites. Large caches of bison bones revealed important hunting sites like Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump west of Fort Macleod or Jumpingpound Creek between Calgary and Banff. Before the Banff Springs Golf course was expanded, there were the remains of pit houses used hundreds of years ago. The Paint Pots in Kootenay National Park were important sources of one of the most important trade goods in this region – ochre. This red pigment was integral to rock art in many locations.
Pictographs are very rare in the mountains. There are only a few sites where ancient paintings can be found. A few of these include Grotto Canyon, and Grassi Lakes near Canmore, Alberta.
Both of these sites are both accessible and unique, but in this episode, I want to focus on the Grotto Canyon site because it’s been baffling scientists for many years.
Grotto Canyon is a beautiful walk, especially in the winter, when the canyon floor freezes solid and offers a great walking surface for hikers equipped with a good pair of ice cleats. After walking .5 km on a wide trail that parallels the 1A Highway, the trail makes a hard right and enters the narrow canyon.
In just minutes, the noisy sounds of nearby industrial sites disappear as the walls of the canyon protect you from their constant rumble. The canyon was formed as glacial runoff drained rapidly melting glaciers some 10,000 years ago. Today you see smoothly carved canyon walls that wind back and forth up the valley for 1.5 km.
The pictographs in Grotto Canyon are easy to miss. In fact, I’d bet that most unguided visitors to the area simply walk right on by. They’re found at the narrowest point in the valley, just before you’re eyes are attracted to a pair of frozen waterfalls slightly ahead. These waterfalls are popular with ice climbers and the sound of their ice axes may draw your attention, just when you should be looking at the rock face on your left.
If you get to the waterfalls and haven’t seen the pictographs, then you’ve, like so many others, walked right past them. Just as you passed the narrow pinch point before the falls, there is a vertical face on the left and with careful observation, you’ll be able to find numerous faint images.
At first, you’ll spot a few of the most prominent images. At eye level, there’s a man with a two-horned head holding a staff. He has only a single leg. Near the base of the outcrop is a grouping of three figures with triangular bodies and some type of headdress.
As your eyes get more accustomed to seeking faint orange forms, you’ll notice a few more indistinct images; a man possibly holding something in his arm next to a smaller figure bent forward at the waist. Above the hunched figure is a zigzag line that almost resembles a snake. The faint figure beneath the zigzag is the most significant symbol of all.
Most of the other figures left to be spotted, and there are a lot of them, remain largely hidden to the naked eye.
Image of Grotto Canyon Pictographs with an overlay of the original pictographs based on the research of Martin Magne and Michael Klassen as well as the photography of Jim Henderson
Over the centuries, a thin, translucent veneer of calcite has slowly been covering the face making them harder to spot, and the simple reality of time has also degraded some of the images. Despite these challenges, this amazing outcrop has been challenging archaeologists for the past 70 years. To those trained in understanding these ancient art forms, this limestone face seems to be out of place here in the Canadian Rockies.
Over the years, there have been rumours that the varnish-like finish covering the pictographs was done by park managers trying to protect them. This is not true, the veneer has been naturally deposited over the centuries.
The first official mention of these pictographs was in 1955 when Douglas Leechman of the Glenbow Foundation published a description of the site. They subsequently sent Selwyn Dewdney to make drawings of the all of the known pictographs in the province and he made a very accurate sketch of the site.
His image even shows the bent figure that would later cause such a stir, but at the time, they never realized its uniqueness. His task was simply a mechanical process of documentation. What Dewdney did accomplish though was to motivate Dr. Thelma Habgood to visit the site in 1967.
She too noticed the bent-over figure and remarked that it appeared to be playing the flute. Above the fluteplayer’s head was a squiggly line resembling a lightning bolt. She realized the figure was similar to paintings known to be created by the Hopi culture of the southern U.S. She said the design reminded her of “some pictographs of the hump-backed fluteplayer, the kachina “Kokopelli” from northeastern Arizona.
Thelma realized it was a similar image to paintings found in Hopi Country in the southern U.S. When you think of the Hopi people, you usually think about the Four Corners area of the U.S. The Four Corners are the only place where four states meet – Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. In fact, the fluteplayer pictograph may even predate the Hopi as a recognizable people. It may date back to their ancestors the Anasazi of sites like Mesa Verde National Park.
The rock art in Grotto Canyon simply doesn’t fit with any rock art ever found in this region. While some of the figures are a little more generic and could be said to have a possible connection to sites found in areas of the northern U.S., several of the figures, beginning with the fluteplayer, simply don’t resemble pictographs found anywhere other than in Hopi Country.
In 1992, the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation sent Michael Klassen to analyze the provinces pictographs and he was lucky enough to find perfect photographic conditions when he arrived in Grotto Canyon. He also remarked on the fluteplayer, and as Thelma had done before him, connected it to the Hopi tradition of the Kokopelli.
Klassen didn’t let the story end here. He partnered with fellow researcher Martin Magne to ferret out the story behind the images.
For years, archaeologists faced the same challenge that you’ll face in Grotto Canyon; the paintings are simply too faded for a detailed inspection with the naked eye. However, in 2001, photographer Jim Henderson used a technique that combined polarized light and night-time photography to get much clearer images of the individual paintings.
These photographs helped them confirm the unusual character of the Grotto Canyon pictographs was as it seemed – a hunched-over character with insect-like antennae, playing what looks like a flute.
Like the two other local sites that contain rock art, Grassi Lakes, and the entrance to the Rats Nest Caves, the paintings used ochre, an iron-rich clay mixed with animal fats to make a paste. Ochre was a key ingredient to pictographs in most areas of North America.
In this case, it might have been locally sourced. The Paint Pots in Kootenay National Park were a major source for ochre and its yellow clays were processed on site and traded widely.
The mucky material was collected and formed into balls the size of a walnut. These were baked in ovens and then ground up to make a yellow powder. When this was added to animal fats, durable paint was produced. So desirable were the clay soils that European settlers also mined the site during the early part of the 20th century and used the clays as pigments in commercial paints.
It was collected in sacks, taken overland to the Bow Valley and then loaded onto trains to be processed into paint. If you visit the Paint Pots today, you can see sinuous mounds which are the remains of the final harvest that was never shipped to market.
Were the pictographs of the Bow Valley painted with these clays? we may never know – at least without some formal chemical analysis of the paints. Unfortunately, that would require a small part of the site to be sampled, and thus destroyed. These images are too valuable historically, and also spiritually to the first nations within whose territory they currently reside.
A chemical analysis would also allow other tests to be done in order to get a better idea of the actual age of the images.
Like many early rock paintings, they were done using a combination of the artist’s fingers, along with some form of brush for finer details. Currently they’re estimated to be somewhere between 500 and 1000 years old.
Curiously, it seems to be the smallest figures on the wall that have caused the biggest stir amongst researchers – these are the fluteplayer, and a line of three figures on the bottom right-hand side of the wall with curiously triangular bodies and heads that seem to be sporting headdresses of some sort.
Kokopelli figures are completely unknown in rock art located outside of the four corners states of Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. In fact, this is the only case of a fluteplayer image to be found north of these four states.
There is not a single site discovered to date in either Montana or Idaho, and yet somehow, a single icon appears on a canyon wall in the Canadian Rockies, far away from its traditional home. However, Kokopellis are not uncommon in the lands of the Hopi and their ancestors. One report lists some 400 images of Kokopelli spread over 80 different locations.
Most date from between 500 to 1300 AD. In the Four Corners, it first appeared around 800 AD, peaked between 1100 to 1400 and disappeared by the year 1600. Many of these dates place some of the sites prior to the modern Hopi people and coincide the with the earlier Anasazi culture.
The fluteplayer has been depicted in many different ways. The earliest representations show simple stick-figures. Later, they transformed to show, in some cases, a humped back and a phallus, often shown seated or reclining on their back.
The Kokopelli was often considered a spiritual entity, As this report states:
“In the traditions of the Hopi people, Kookopölö (Kokopelli) is a hunchbacked trickster figure with special powers, who acts both as a fertility symbol and rain priest. In his hump, he carries seeds, blankets, and special gifts that he uses to seduce young women.”
The fluteplayer was sometimes connected to the cicada, which would melt the snows when the snakes asked them to. This may explain why many of the images seem to display some insect-like features like antennae. The Grotto Canyon Kokopelli fits within this group.
The connection with cicada is related to the fluting sounds the insect makes. This “fluting” was said to bring on the warming of spring. It was a totem of the Hopi Flute clan, so it may have been both a supernatural being and a family totem, although the origins of the Kokopelli in rock art sites predates the Hopi Flute clan.
Another puzzling aspect of the Grotto pictograph is the zigzag line above the head of the fluteplayer. This arrangement of fluteplayer icon with sinuous lines is also found in other southern locations. According to Hopi legend, the snake would ask the cicada to melt the winter snows. The fluteplayer has been connected to the cicada in some stories. If the Kokapelli’s insect-like features reflect that connection to the cicada, then the snaking lines above the heads of the Grotto Canyon pictograph (and other more southerly examples) makes sense.
In addition to the Kokopelli, three characters on the lower right of the rock face, also seem to have a connection to these more southerly cultures. If you look towards the base of the rock face and to the right of the Kokopelli, there is a group of three small figures.
These figures have triangular shaped bodies, headdresses, or a pair of horns, unusual foot placement, and staffs or solemn items in the hands. It almost looks like they are wearing ceremonial costumes remarkably similar to those reflected in Hopi, or pre-Hopi rock art of the southwestern U.S.
Like the fluteplayer, they don’t have any connection to any local cultures, but again are most similar to these southern peoples.
Are you confused? Well so are the scientists trying to solve these mysteries. With no written records to help clarify the stories, nor any detailed physical dating of the site, added to the fact that the rock art was created by an ancient people, even native elders are left to speculate.
So what’s up with these pictographs? As they examined the various scenarios that might have led to the pictographs origins, they came up with six possible explanations for the presence of these Hopi style images so far from their traditional lands:
- “the whole panel is a recent non-Aboriginal fake;
- the similarities are simply coincidental;
- the Stoney captured southwestern people and the captives left the images;
- the Stoney used their knowledge of southwestern imagery and captured power to render the images;
- other Aboriginal visitors to the Southwest painted the panel upon their return, using memories of what they saw, or images on objects they carried back, or;
- it may be a physical substantiation of Hopi stories concerning the northward travels of the Flute Clan.”
One thing that archaeologists can say is that they’re not a fake. The report outlines the evidence to substantiate this claim:
- “They have been known to archaeologists since at least the early 1950s, and therefore predate the current “New Age” Kokopelli fad;
- The landscape context is consistent with other rock art sites in the region.
- The pigments and techniques used to make the pictographs are consistent with regional rock art traditions;
- The panel composition is internally consistent and all of the motifs appear to be associated and contemporaneous; and
- Most importantly, the pictographs are sealed behind a translucent mineral deposit, which can be assumed to have taken many years to accumulate, although the deposition rate has not been studied. It should be noted that the clarity of the pictographs apparently has not diminished since they were first documented in the 1950s, suggesting that the rate of mineral deposition is on the order of centuries.”
Can archaeologists currently prove these pictographs to be of a southern origin? The answer is a resounding NO! However, Hopi stories do offer intriguing possibilities.
Kokopellis were one of a number of ancestral spirits that were a part of Hopi culture.
The Hopi were also known to travel extensively in search of new lands to plant corn. Their oral histories tell a story of emissaries being sent out to the four directions of the winds. According to this story, one of those groups, the Flute Clan, travelled north to a land of rock and snow. The cold temperatures forced them to return back to warmer landscapes where their crops would grow.
Might that route have taken them through Grotto Canyon? It is possible but impossible to prove.
The first nations that historically, and currently, have long histories on this landscape also have theories as to how these images may have been created. The Blackfoot Confederacy and the Stoney Nakoda also made long sojourns to trade, make war, and explore potential new territories. There were also extensive trade networks between the local peoples and, perhaps, the Hopi.
Some local stories talk about young men, maybe young shaman, travelling south and learning the stories of the ancestors of the Hopi. In other stories, local Stoney or Blackfoot travelled far to the south to make war but as elder put it, the “Rattlesnake people lived in cliffs and were difficult to attack.”
In warfare, when one tribe is the winner in a battle, they also win the right to use the symbols and icons of the other. Perhaps this was the source of the images. One of the most famous Blackfoot Chiefs, Crowfoot, claimed a prestigious tipi design after one victorious battle. Symbols, like stories, were personal property and could be traded or even won in battle.
While each of the stories is plausible, the uniqueness of the fluteplayer, the zigzag line above him, and the three characters on the bottom of the display led researchers to conclude there had to be a connection with the Hopi people or their ancestors in order to get these very specific images so far from their traditional lands.
As you walk up the Canyon, past the pinch point that contains the pictographs, the waterfalls at the head of the canyon seem to mark a dead end. If you explore a little to the left though, you can continue to explore much further up the valley of Grotto Creek. Locations like this, pinch points that funnel travellers past them, are a common feature in rock art sites. They may have been seen as sacred passageways taking travellers from one realm to the next.
Walk the canyon, appreciate the pictographs, and recognize that these sites are still sacred. They are sacred as protected places but also sacred to the Blackfoot, Stoneys, and perhaps even the Hopi or their ancestors. However these images came to be, there is no doubt, they help to add to the magic of this landscape and force us to take a moment to ponder the long history of visitors to the mountain west.
Next up…what does a slowly diminishing snowpack over time really mean?
Less Snow puts many species at risk
In Episode 71, I talked about the many ways that animals and birds have adapted to dealing with the cold weather that comes with northern winters. One week earlier, in Episode 70, I related stories about how polar bears are also suffering from a lack of winter pack ice.
With changing climates, we’ve had to learn new terms like greenhouse gases and mitigation. We need to understand the difference between weather and climate and global warming vs climate change (pssst. If you’re wondering, one focuses solely on the gradual increase in temperatures, while the other looks at all of the factors that affect climate in a particular locale – climate is much more than just temperature).
This week, I want to add another term to your vocabulary: the cryosphere. The cryosphere refers to all of those places in the world that experience water in its solid form for part or all of the year. This would include the frozen ice on Hudson Bay for polar bears, but also the protective blanket of snow that is a critical part of the landscape here in the Rockies.
If you haven’t checked out episode 71, please do. You can listen online at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep071. It offers a great primer on how species have learned to survive and thrive in winter landscapes. Essentially, the cryosphere refers to winter worlds, lands covered in snow and ice.
While this winter, many of us have shivered under the polar vortex, the recent temperatures that have finally broken the 0C mark have been a cause for joy, the long-term trends show that this winter was not the norm.
Winters are getting shorter and shorter. Snowpacks are getting thinner and thinner. The snow in the valleys arrives later and disappears earlier. The snow in the alpine is also becoming more ephemeral on the landscape.
When we were kids in school, we were taught about food webs. We learned songs like there once was a lady who swallowed a fly…and while these were fun little dittys, they taught us some important lessons – everything is connected.
We learned that spiders eat flys, birds eat spiders, cats eat birds, dogs eat cats, and so on. The lesson was that each of these species was reliant on the other. If there are no flies, there are no spiders and so on down the line.
What we didn’t learn in school was the lesson that polar bears are teaching us now. The landscapes in which animals live are also just as important as the foods they eat. As you travel through the mountains, the animals and birds that you see here in the winter and summer were forged by the snow and ice that are an integral part of the landscape – its cryosphere.
Just like the frozen ice is threatening the polar bears in places like Churchill, warming temperatures are also threatening animals much further south. Species that are snow dependent, are, well dependent on snow. If there is less of it, or it lasts for a shorter period than their adaptations require, they will struggle.
I’ve been exploring these mountains for the past 35 years and I’ve covered thousands of kilometres of mountain trails. In all of those years, I’ve only encountered one wolverine. These “skunk bears” as they are often called are a true ghost of the wilderness.
They are a true winter lover and thrive in high elevation landscapes with deep snowpacks. These powerful animals are perfectly adapted for cold mountain locations. The angelines (yes, that’s what you call a female wolverine), have most likely just produced their kits and are hunkered down in their dens. They excavate these lairs into the snow often at the edge of treeline.
According to the Wolverine Foundation, a non-profit organization of biologists focusing on this sensitive species:
“Snow greater than 1 m deep, distributed uniformly or accumulated in drifts, provides protection from cold temperatures. Long, complex snow tunnels in hardened snowdrifts characterize den sites in tundra and alpine areas, and in some cases, the tunnels lead down to entrances under boulders that provide additional protection for kits. In forested areas where snow is deep and soft, dens are located under fallen trees or boulders that provide added structure to the den, preventing snow tunnels from slumping.”
They describe two types of dens, reproductive and natal. Reproductive dens represent the birth dens for the kits. Natal dens form the plan B sites where the females can transfer the kits if the birth den is threatened. How complex can these snowy dens be? Their research has found that:
“In tundra and alpine areas where wind-hardened snowdrifts are used as natal dens, the dens have a complex structure involving branching snow tunnels about 30-40 cm in width that are up to 60 m in total length and contain a number of enlarged beds 40-90 cm wide that are used as lairs for the kits, food storage, and latrine depot.”
These deep snowpacks keep the wolverine safe, warm and offer the opportunity to build extensive tunnels that allow escape should the den be threatened.
What happens if the snowpack just isn’t there for them to build these dens? In some areas of their habitat, this is exactly what is happening. Without snow, there are no denning sites for wolverine. Already, the U.S. Forest Service is worried that they may disappear from much of their range as the snowpack diminishes over time and reduces the availability of suitable denning sites.
If we look at snowpack depth over time, the western U.S., as well as Canada has experienced a drastic reduction in snow depth in both spring and fall. As climates warm, precipitation that traditionally fell as snow may fall as rain.
Snow plays many important roles both locally and globally. Locally, it provides critical habitat for animals like wolverine, lynx, snowshoe hare, and even mice and voles that thrive under blankets of insulating snow.
On a more regional or global scale, snow helps to slow global warming. The more snow you have on a landscape, the more of the sun’s energy is reflected, and the longer it takes for the seasonal snow cover to melt.
Beneath the snow, the world stays warm and insulated. A landscape with limited snow cover offers little protection from the cold temperatures that we’ve shivered through this winter. Snow is an essential ecological blanket that protects everything from tiny mice and voles to pika, weasels, marten, wolverine, and even black bears during their winter denning.
While grizzlies can excavate dens into hillsides, black bears lack digging claws and so they usually rely on snow cover to keep them toasty during their winter sleep.
In some areas of the U.S. snowshoe hare are slowly vanishing from the southern parts of their range as lower snowpacks reduce the advantages that their large back feet offer in deep snow. Coincidentally, even in places like Canmore and Banff, bobcats are moving into lynx territory. As winters get milder, it has allowed them to move further north into landscapes where they would have struggled in the past.
Even in places like Churchill, Manitoba, I’ve seen red fox moving north into arctic fox territory. Unfortunately for the arctic fox, their small size is little match for a predatory red fox.
Lower snowpacks, and earlier melts also mean longer fire seasons, reduced spring runoff, and increased outbreaks of pests like the mountain pine beetle.
Locally, we are very lucky in Canmore to host the Cold Water Laboratory of the Global Water Futures research program in Canada. This critical lab is funded in part by a 77.8 million dollar grant. Its goal is to look at the future of water availability, the implications of changing climate on the landscape, and the extreme weather events that are associated with them, and finally, how to better predict them.
While science alone can’t change the changes, it may help one species to better adapt to them. For wildlife, they may simply abandon their southern ranges and migrate north where they may come into contact with species that already call that landscape home.
As I often explain when I’m guiding polar bear viewing trips; polar bears can’t just migrate north – it’s full. As one habitat becomes unsuitable for a species, say wolverine, it can’t just march north. That landscape is already full of wolverine that are well established.
As animals like red fox forge beyond their northern limits, it’s other animals like the diminutive arctic fox that suffer. The small size and short legs of the arctic fox are adaptations specifically designed for cold climates…unfortunately for the southern populations, those climates are not cold enough any more.
And with that, it’s time to wrap this episode up. If you are planning a visit to the mountain west, drop me a line if you are looking for guides, or guidance, to make your visit a memorable one. Don’t forget to visit the show notes at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep073 for links to additional information. If you’d like to reach out to me personally, you can comment on the show notes, or email me at info@wardcameron.com. You can also hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron…and with that said, the sun’s out and it’s time to go snowshoeing. I’ll talk to you next week.