Seminole Canyon SP, Fate Bell Shelter - Pictographs on Waymarking.com

These pictographs are located within Seminole Canyon State Park, a Texas State Park situated near the Pecos River a short distance west of Comstock, Texas. Here is the link to the park website. They can only be viewed by taking a Ranger guided tour of the Fate Bell Shelter within the canyon. Tours are given daily Wednesday through Sunday, with the times varying depending upon the season. From June 1st through August 31st the tour is at 10 a.m. only, and from September 1st through May 31st at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.

All tours start from the visitor center/museum shown here.

The rock art was created by the native peoples of the area and is thought to date to at least 4,500 years ago and possibly considerably earlier. Research indicates that about 7000 years ago this region underwent a climatic change resulted in a landscape much like we see today. Co-incident with this change in environment, a new people appeared who were mostly dependent on gathering wild plants and hunting small animals. Living in small groups since the land would not support large populations, they are considered to be the ones who created the rock art found at Fate Bell and other rock shelters in the Lower Pecos River Country.

The specific style of rock art found at Fate Bell are rock paintings called pictographs. These early artists had to obtain everything they needed from nature, and their materials included colored minerals for paint pigments, animal fats and urine for binders, shells or flat rocks for palettes, and fibrous plant leaves for brushes. Rather than a single figure, they are panels many feet long containing numerous figures, the exact meaning of which lays buried with the people who painted them.

There has been extensive research into the meaning of the paintings (there was a Masters Candidate from the University of Texas who was doing research for her thesis on our tour), and according to one website "the meaning of Lower Pecos River Style murals suggests that the images may communicate important elements of the culture’s belief system, such as shamanic journeys to the land of the dead and a symbolic relationship between deer and peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus."

One of the many signs that dot this large cavern.

Photograph of the cavern wall showing the same art.

This area is reputed to have one of the best concentrations of pictographs anywhere in the world. And while we were just visitors who were passing through, (being more interested in petroglyphs), there was no doubt that was a very unique place and well worth a visit by anyone interested in pictographs.

For your pleasure, below are several additional photos of the pictographs in Fate Bell Shelter.

2. You must include a close up photo of the pictograph and your GPSr. The pictograph must be recognizable.

3. Tell a little bit about what you learned of the area.