Ancient Petroglyphs of the Southwest US.
California
My home in New Zealand is full of interesting locations, from mountains and glaciers to white sand beaches and cloud forests. However one thing you won't find in NZ, are petroglyphs dating back thousands of years. The reason for this is quite simple, no humans lived here until around the 14th century.
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​Ancient sites have always been of interest to me, so when i decided to visit the US again in 2025, i knew i wanted to capture some images of petroglyphs under the night sky. I knew broadly where i would be travelling to, although i didn't book a return flight until the day before i left NZ, so there was still a lot of flexibility leading into the trip.
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The first location i photographed petroglyphs was in California, in the Owen's Valley. Here i knew of a few locations i wanted to see, especially 13 moons and sky rock. Unless you know where to go, finding these sites can be a challenge as their locations are generally kept secret, but it didn't take too long to spot them using google earth.​​
image 1: 13 moons and the northern milky way
image 2: the andromeda galaxy and 13 moons
The next petroglyph was sky rock, a huge sky-facing slab of stone with carvings all over it. The only difficulty was that the milky way would not be in the right position, and to line up a composition you would have to walk over the top of the petroglyph, something i didn't want to do. So instead i waited for the milky way to move around the sky, more to the west, at which point the moon had risen up and washed away most of the darkness.
Here i just captured a simple 14mm image. If there was some way to walk around the petroglyph without trampling the ancient art then this would have made for an amazing image earlier in the night, but regardless it was a cool thing to see.
image 3: sky rock in the moonlight
Utah
If there was anywhere in the US that i would return to see petroglyphs, it would be Utah. Unfortunately we were in Utah during the near full moon, so i only had one night with a small window of darkness. Otherwise there were dozens of places i wanted to photograph.
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For the window of darkness right before dawn, i chose to shoot at this huge wall of petroglyphs in the Canyonlands. In hindsight the composition wasn't a great one, and the fact that the petroglyph was in a small canyon made it tricky to capture the sky in a nice way. But overall the shot was a nice souvenir if nothing else.
image 4: petroglyphs in the canyonlands
There were a ton of other petroglyphs near Moab that i would have loved to shoot at night, but that will have to wait for another time.
California part 2
Although there are lots of other rock art sites across the US, the next place we saw them was right at the end of the trip, back in the Owen's Valley.
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This time around i had a few more locations in mind, a little further to the north than we had been previously. These sites were a lot more weathered, with some of the petroglyphs barely visible anymore, likely a much older site than 13 moons. Some of the estimates for the age of these petroglyphs range from 2,000 to 5,000 years old, possibly older than the pyramids.
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I spent two nights up in this area, photographing dozens of different petroglyphs. I had a few particular compositions in mind for highly detailed panoramas, but a majority of my images were with a fish eye lens i bought right before the trip.
image 5: the great rift
For a few of these images, i attempted to create some deepscapes — a deep sky image with a terrestrial foreground. For these kinds of shots, i used my 135mm lens to zoom in and capture more detail on my subjects.
image 6: corona borealis
image 7: the pleiades
My second night among the petroglyphs was another beautifully clear sky. I wanted to catch the milky way core early in the night while it was still high in the southern sky. And then later i would focus on the likes of orion and cygnus.
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I found a small but interesting petroglyph that was perfectly positioned to have the milky way core right behind it, so this was my first capture for the evening, and one of my favorites from the trip.
image 8: the milky way center
A little later in the evening, orion rose up into the eastern sky. By this point some cloud had rolled in so things were getting a little muddy, and the zodiacal light was quite strong over this region of the milky way. It was still cool to see orion upside down, or maybe it was the right way up? Flipped, relative to the southern hemisphere view.
image 9: orion the hunter
Before the sun rose up and washed away my final night under the stars, i wanted to catch one composition that is exclusive to the northern sky. This would be an image of cygnus coming vertically out of the western horizon. There weren't any particularly striking petroglyphs that suited the composition, so in the end i made a self portrait, faintly illuminating the foreground with my flashlight.
image 10: me under cygnus