The long battle to bring national recognition to Nine Mile Canyon took a significant step forward this week when 63 rock art sites were officially added to the National Register of Historic Places.
"The best part for me," said longtime preservation advocate Pam Miller, "is Nine Mile Canyon takes its place alongside the national treasures that we recognize in our country as being part of our national history."
The campaign to list Nine Mile began in 1973, and it is the first time in decades that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management stepped up to include archaeological sites on the register, said Jerry Spangler, a member of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance.
The alliance, along with Miller's Nine Mile Canyon Coalition, the Utah Rock Art Research Association, the BLM and other groups have been working on the Nine Mile designation in earnest for more than a year.
The site is a 45-mile gallery of ancient Indian pictographs and petroglyphs in a 75-mile-long redrock canyon east of Price that has been recognized for more than a century. Much of it was created by American Indian ancestors who lived throughout the Southwest more than 700 years ago.
Dominated by the handicrafts of the Fremont archaeological period, the paintings and carvings have brought the canyon walls alive, transforming them into a kind of newsstand spanning thousands of years of ancient Utah life.
"It's a fabulous first step," said Spangler, an archaeologist, "but it's a baby step."
He noted that the 63 sites added to the register on Monday represent just a fraction of the 10,000 "sites"; each contains between 10 and 100 items. Originally, preservation advocates had requested that the canyon be treated as a district, so it wouldn't be dealt with piecemeal.
BLM spokeswoman Megan Crandall noted that being on the register does not accord Nine Mile any additional money or a special protected status.
"It gives the recognition these cultural resources need," she said. "If people recognize that something's valuable, that begins the education -- people want to learn about it -- and ultimately, from education comes preservation."
Her agency plans to recommend another 100 sites a year until all 834 known sites, plus any future ones, can be added.
Already, the designation will figure into the BLM's plans to update an environmental impact statement for gas development on the West Tavaputs Plateau, which is mostly above Nine Mile and the scene of numerous gas exploration and extraction sites.
"We're actually at the beginning," she said, "of a long, important road."
The 63 sites fall into three major contexts -- prehistoric rock art, West Tavaputs adaptation and historic period, says the Bureau of Land Management.
Nine prehistoric rock art sites contain petroglyphs and pictographs typical of the region.
40 sites represent the West Tavaputs adaptation common
Four historic period sites contain remnants of more recent activities, such as 19th century homesteading and livestock management.
