Wees Bar –
Prior to the building of the Swan Falls Dam, a hydroelectric dam built in 1909 on the Snake River, James Lowell Wees, farmer and gold miner, settled in the Snake River Canyon in 1879.
Just up the hill from what are now the remnants of Wees’ stone house are a bunch of large boulders with petroglyphs on their smooth sides.
The petroglyphs are believed to have been chiseled into the hard basalt boulders by the ancestors of the Shoshone Paiute/Bannock tribes up to 10,000 years ago!
The trail that leads to Wees Bar from Swan Falls is a good 12 miles round trip so bring lots of water, snacks, and watch for snakes.
Here are a couple links with more pics and detail:
House of Wander Blog – Wees Bar Petroglyphs
Visit Idaho – Exploring Idaho’s Petroglyphs
Lavan Martineau
“Rocks do speak, if you know how to read them. LaVan did. Before he passed away in 2000, he devoted over 44 years to learning their secrets. His entire life has been spent among the Indians. He was familiar with their ways, traditions, and philosophies. Knowledgable in the sign language, fluent in Indian tongues, versed in cryptonalytical methods.
A man who could produce the key to the mystery of rock writings had to be an unusual man, a man tenacious in the quest for discovery. Here is a man with the right tools and the right background to tell this story, not his story, early man’s story, the Language of the rocks. This was: LaVan Martineau.” – KC Publications
