Hieroglyphic Trail petroglyphs
— — a thousand-year drawing that the rain still washes around.
Not only on a wall.
“A short canyon on the western edge of the Superstition Wilderness, east of Phoenix, where a dark basalt wall above a string of seasonal pools carries dozens of Hohokam petroglyphs pecked into the desert varnish. The figures are roughly a thousand years old. The name is a misnomer: these are not hieroglyphs but petroglyphs, made by the people who farmed the Salt River valley before the Spanish arrived. The trail in from First Water Road is about three miles round-trip, mostly easy, with the climb in the last half mile. From the studio.
Hieroglyphic Trail petroglyphs, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hieroglyphic Canyon sits on the southwestern edge of the Superstition Wilderness inside the Tonto National Forest in Pinal County, Arizona, reached from a trailhead in the Gold Canyon community east of Apache Junction. The route climbs gently for about a mile and a half across desert flats before entering a notch in the foothills where a dark wall of weathered basalt carries the petroglyphs. The site is roughly 25 miles east of central Phoenix and shares the same volcanic geology as the rest of the Superstition range. The wilderness is administered by the Mesa Ranger District of the Tonto.
The petroglyphs were pecked through the dark desert varnish on the basalt to expose the lighter rock underneath, a technique used across the Sonoran Desert for at least two thousand years. The figures here are attributed to the Hohokam culture, which farmed the Salt and Gila river valleys from roughly 450 to 1450 CE and built the original canal systems that modern Phoenix later reused. Snakes, spirals, deer, anthropomorphic figures, and concentric circles appear on the panel. The varnish itself is a thin oxide film that takes manganese and iron from windblown dust over centuries; it is the canvas, not a coating.
The trail runs about three miles round-trip with roughly 600 feet of climb, most of it in the final half mile to the panel. The Forest Service asks visitors not to touch the petroglyphs; skin oils accelerate weathering of the varnish. Seasonal pools below the panel hold water after winter rains and through spring and can be dry by June. The site sits near 2,600 feet of elevation, low enough that summer afternoons routinely exceed 105°F; the comfortable window is October through April, ideally on a winter weekday when the small trailhead lot is not full.