Castle Gardens petroglyphs Bighorn Basin
— — the shields the rock kept facing out.
Not only on a wall.
“A bowl of weathered sandstone in central Wyoming, fenced and gated by the BLM, where one of the most distinctive petroglyph traditions in North America was cut into the rock. The shield-bearer figures, round and ornamented and looking straight out, were carved across centuries by ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone. The desert is quiet. The road in is dirt for nine miles. from the studio
Castle Gardens petroglyphs Bighorn Basin, 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.
Castle Gardens Petroglyph Site sits in Fremont County, Wyoming, roughly nine miles south of Moneta on a graded dirt road off U.S. 20/26. It lies in the high desert between the Owl Creek Mountains and the Rattlesnake Range, at about 5,800 feet. The Bureau of Land Management's Lander Field Office administers the site, with a gated enclosure and steel cages over the most important panels. The Bighorn Basin proper lies just to the north across the Owl Creeks, and the shield-bearer style spans both basins.
The carvings were cut into soft Tensleep Sandstone, a Pennsylvanian-age formation that weathers into pale tan cliffs and pockets across central Wyoming. The signature motif is the shield-bearer, a round shield carved with elaborate interior designs, sometimes with a head and legs added above and below. Most are dated archaeologically to the Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric periods, roughly 1000 to 1700 CE. Numic-speaking ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone are the most-credited authors, with some panels possibly cut by ancestral Athabaskan groups passing through.
The site has no seasonal closure, though the road becomes impassable in mud and snow, leaving it practically accessible from late spring through fall. No fee, no visitor center, no water. The BLM cages and viewing platforms protect the major panels. Cell service is unreliable beyond Moneta. Theft and vandalism in the 1940s removed several panels, including the Great Turtle shield, now held by the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne. Visitors are asked not to touch, chalk, or rub the carvings.