Mysterious Paintings in Fremont Caves

Hello everybody, Ben Woodruff here and in today's video I'm going to be talking about Fremont Caves and pictographs at Fremont Caves. This is something that hasn't really been localized. Archaeologists are well aware of this but archaeologists don't often get general information out to the general public and so I want to share this connection that I've made and just make sure that people are in general aware of it. So first of all we're going to talk about the Fremont people. The Fremont people, give or take, they basically lived in Utah. They kind of stretch out on the borders there and in my video I've kind of visited a lot of the outlier Chacoan sites. Like look at the Baker, Nevada site that I do out of Great Basin National Park. That's like as far west as you go and kind of a wild site in and of itself. But basically these are people who are in general we say they were from about 1 AD to about 1300 AD. More so 1200 AD but like in the Uinta Basin here in Utah by Skinwalker Ranch you know you're pushing out into the 1300s in that level there. So these people are hunter-gatherers. Okay so you are hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants. They eventually started to get agricultural ideas up from the south from Mexico. Well the ancestral Puebloan people started getting corn from Mexico and then they in turn started to share that idea and shared corn kernels with the Fremonts and say hey look you can grow this stuff. The Fremonts never went all in on agriculture but they definitely were agrarian. But region to region in this region they're hunting more in this region they're doing a bit more agriculture. They got a better climate because you look at the range map of the Fremont this is a broad range and a broad way of life. So these people were very adaptable and they liked to live typically in pit houses. There's sometimes some adobe structures but usually any adobe structures you see for the Fremont are almost exclusively granaries. Granaries that are you know storing corn. There are some big notable exceptions like Wolf Village in Utah and Baker, Nevada side also has some wild adobe structures but other than that these are basically pit house dwellers. So a pit house is half above ground half below ground. It's supported by four beams and this is something that keeps you warm in the winter cool in the summer. It's a pretty good way to live. It's pretty gun dry. You come in from a ladder on the top and then you climb down in and once you're inside you know you have that that structural security and that relative safety and it's a good place you can have a fire inside it works. So the Fremont people we know had a huge fixation and obsession with mountain goats. We're talking about bighorn sheep. Bighorn sheep. Now bighorns are a very beautiful enigmatic unique species. They're very iconic and you know when they're clashing and the males are button heads and it echoes through the canyons. So these are cool animals. They're very iconic and we know that Fremont did hunt them but the level to which they hunted them does not match the level to which we find bones of them at Fremont sites. So in other words yeah they hunted some bighorn but as much as they hunted deer or elk or rabbits or things like that just just as much there seems to be something more. The Fremonts seem to have a much deeper reverence and fixation on bighorns. We we know they meant something very special to them and we don't know exactly what but by and large you will always always always see bighorns at Fremont petroglyph sites. Guaranteed you're like oh there's a bunch of bighorns probably going to be a Fremont site. You just kind of know it. So we know these people had this way of life. When you're going up into the mountains you often will go to caves if you're going to hunt. So the Fremont are living in pit houses. Now you can live in a cave and maybe some of the early Fremont did but a cave is a great place to stay and camp when you are hunting. And we often often find Fremont cave sites where they would come up they go up into the mountains and they'd stay there for a few days they go hunting make their kill and then go back down to the houses down below. So these are you know you you have carbonation up on the ceiling or from fires they make soot on the ceilings and there's artifacts down below. If you watch my video on Bone Cave they were even doing fishing at some of these caves where they would you know catch fish and we had all the bones in the bottom there from the fish they caught. So these caves were important good use but one thing that never gets mentioned is the fact that at most of these caves right by the entrance or just inside are red pictographs and these are painted. So again a petroglyph is chiseled in a pictograph is painted in. Now typically if you're going to paint with earth pigments the color will last but it won't last on its own you got to mix it with hide glue. So you take granulized rawhide and bring it to almost a boil that makes those earth pigments in painted on it's going to stay forever and if you don't put a lot of high glue in it's going to start to streak down with water and stuff. So what I'm going to share with you is this is a big lead-in right what I'm going to share with you is three sites that I have been to that are Fremont caves that have these images. I'm not going to mention where they are exactly one of them I kind of will but kind of keep them preserved. They're known sites but they're they're pretty special and pictographs just they need to not be touched. So the first one is in the Wasatch Front. Now I got to tell you two I asked permission to mention the person who told me about two of these three caves is an incredible person named Jessica Rowley-Hanks. She's an incredible outdoor adventurist she does it all she taught me how to gather wild mushrooms she loves to go exploring and rappelling and caving. She herself has discovered a lot of caves and there's one that was like uninhabited that was like filled with rocks that she found and her kids like opened it up and like were able to get in. So she just gets out and explores and has a spirit of adventure and learning like nobody else you'll ever meet and she was kind enough to share a couple of these sites with me. So I'm not going to mention where these sites are but I wanted to give her credit for sharing them and finding these. So this first one is in the Wasatch Front and I want to give you an idea of just how insane it is to get these spots. So I'm not going to show you the cave itself but I've got an old drone footage of when I hiked up to it and if you look at this footage you can see how steep this scree is where this rock slide and right up at the top of this is where the cave is and this is incredibly rough terrain to get around it's just it's dangerous this perfect bighorn habitat it absolutely is. Now at this cave up at the top there are a couple of pictographs have been painted on these are red trapezoidal. Now at this area there's a lot of water there's a lot of snow and so eventually it has kind of you know muted and spread out the pigment so it's not as well defined but you can see these are you know kind of typical trapezoidal uh you know Fremont figures like you would expect to see. But again they're right in front of the cave seems important we don't know what it means but we know it means something because we see this pattern again and again and again so this is a really cool cave. I wanted to hike up to this one but again I'm still recovering from cardiac arrest and a stroke and I started I'm like I'm gonna wait so this spring I will hike up to this cave and do a video on it but it's it's like literally this steep and you're just going up a rock slide so I'm like yeah I'm gonna wait. So the next one is near the Baker Nevada site up in the mountains above it this is actually in Great Basin National Park. It's kind of funny because these are if you know roughly about these these are pretty easy to find. If you find these be aware I did a video on these and if be aware that there's signs that say don't go into these without permission from the park service and I was going to film in it and I was getting permission of the five historic tribes of the area who claim claim to this land and I got permission from four out of the five before I went to film and didn't get the fifth yet so hopefully next year I'll be able to film in this cave just for posterity so people can see what it's like inside of the cave but at this cave this is a Fremont cave where again people live down below they'd hike several miles up they'd hunt in these canyons and then go back down below so you might be there for days or even a few weeks and the you know you have the so it has built up up above well right in the front of this you have red paint red ogre painted trapezoidal figures that are Fremont you're very distinctly Fremont the shapes and kind of like with the oftentimes you have kind of like little horns like sort of pointing up it's pretty neat these either this particular area the the Rocky Mountain west the western United States most of it is very dry it's very conducive to preservation of archaeological sites and of pictographs this particular site does get a lot of rain and snow that has worn down these images but also looking at them I don't think they had as much hide glue uh that they were painted on with uh just looking at them looking at the density of the pigment I think this was kind of diluted paint so to speak but again you have right in front of a cave an important cave it's used regularly you have these images there's also again some polka dots and some zigzags not sure what those mean but again very prominently these red ochre images painted in front of the cave so don't know what it means but it means something so now here's two sites hundreds of miles apart that have the same thing now the third one and I've done videos on this this is one of the coolest sites ever and this one that Jessica taught me about as well and this is out in the desert of northern Utah this is extremely far north this is out by the Great Salt Lake and this this is a cave so I'm going to show you a shot here panning out from it and nobody lived in this cave nobody camped in this cave there's no soot there's no sign of carbon or anything but down below there is another cave that people did stay in and did camp in so this is very strange because at the site you have a lower cave where people are staying but they're still keeping the tradition of doing some sort of an earth pigment to paint a red trapezoidal figure but they're painting it in another cave up towards the top which this we don't know what it means but this is indicative and suggestive of again deep spiritual meaning that whatever this is that whoever this figure is is it you is it a spirit whatever it is is it a deity figure whatever it is it seems to be like you know whether declaration this is a cave held by our people or this is protected by this spirit it's something and something big and special let's take a look at this figure because this one is radically different so going into this cave this figure is still technically angular in shape but it's quite a bit different it's more lanky and stretched out it's holding a shield and looks like a spear or weapon and it's got what looks like feathers or plumes on the head and if you look closely this is so old some of this pigment has worn off and there's like an additional six of these plumes that you can't see unless you look really close i would love to come in here with some of the archaeological equipment that we have used for scanning on skinwalker ranch and i would love to be able to take a look at this and see just what is there under the surface that can't really be seen by the visual spectrum of the human eye currently so this is a really cool image it does still kind of fit within the realm of fremont and it does we would still classify this as a fremont thing but i cannot help but note that it looks very similar to the barrier canyon style stuff now barrier canyon i've done videos on it and depending on when i put this video out maybe my barrier canyon video isn't out yet but barrier canyon is a very old you know potentially as far back as 10 000 years old and it's only kind of in one region in the southwest nowhere near this cave i'm talking about but you look at some of these images and you see kind of how they look and they're kind of holding up a shield and kind of the same shape and kind of sort of headgear and it's reminiscent of this red figure in this cave i don't think they're related uh there's only so many ways you can simplistically depict the human form it's probably just coincidence but it's worth noting it's worth noting i don't think that a barrier canyon group was all the way up in northern utah i could be wrong i would love to be wrong but probably not that's probably not the case but if it is that's worthy of noting but this will again there's still bighorns on these same cliffs today but we don't see any bighorn petroglyphs anywhere in the area the only thing is just this one incredible pictograph in this cave on top of this mountain it's glorious it's huge and it's beautiful so we see again if we're going to consider this fremont which archaeologically it is considered to be fremont just a slightly more stylized and again the fremont had such a broad range and even though that we lump them in together different fremonts in different areas the further south you go the more pueblo and they're going to be in their tradition and their art styles and the further north you get the more of hunters they are they're more they're going to be focused on elk and things like that so you're going to have differences in the culture wherever you're at so it could just be that these were so far north and so far west that you know their own art style was shifting a little from the regular trapezoidal body shape you normally see at fremont pictographs and petroglyphs but i think it's really cool so again these are three sites there's many more out there and if you know more i would love to hear i would love to hear if you have heard of fremont caves that have in them or in front of them some of these red humanoid figures because it's really cool and again you never hear that you never hear that when people are talking about the fremonts you're never here talking about caves you hear about pit houses you hear about pilling figures you hear about granaries and you hear about petroglyphs of big horns that's the big focus but it's like no they also dwelled in caves and they also painted figures in front of and in these caves and people need to be aware of that so i wanted to share that so that you could be aware of it let me know your thoughts in the comments and let me know your experiences and things you have seen out there as well i hope you enjoyed this video if you haven't already if you can hit subscribe i very much appreciate it and always remember that life is a gift so never stop learning and never stop exploring we'll see you next time