Grotto Canyon

Rock paintings up a frozen creek, including a flute player a long way from home

Grotto Canyon is a narrow cleft in the front ranges of the Rockies in Kananaskis Country, just west of Exshaw, about 100 km west of Calgary and ten minutes from Canmore. The trail follows the creek bed between towering limestone walls, and on those walls, painted in red ochre, are well-known pictographs: human figures, animals and what appear to be musical instruments, reckoned to be between 500 and 1,300 years old.

One figure has made the canyon famous. In a 2002 paper in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology, A Possible Fluteplayer Pictograph Site Near Exshaw, Alberta, the archaeologists Martin Magne and Michael Klassen described how polarized light photography in 2001 brought out faint images on the wall. They concluded that one was likely a fluteplayer motif, with human-like figures resembling the southwestern Fremont style, and that the site was likely related to Hopi traditions, much like rock art in the American Southwest. Travel Alberta now tells visitors the images are thought to come from Hopi people who travelled from what is now the United States. How the motif came this far north is still an open question.

The paintings are fragile, and they have suffered. The site has been damaged over time, and one July a guided group reported seeing walking sticks and hiking poles against the wall in and around the paintings, then found fresh scratches on them. Photographs spread across social media, and conservation officers from the Bow Valley District of Alberta Environment and Parks investigated it as alleged vandalism. The province's 24-hour line, 310-LAND, takes reports of illegal activity in its parks and recreation areas.

Look as long as you like and keep hands, poles and everything else off the rock. Across the Bow Valley, Grassi Lakes holds another painted panel, the Medicine Man, a figure holding what looks like a large hoop, better preserved than the ones at Grotto Canyon.