The canyon floor held a detail that would have slowed any attentive traveler: deep, round grinding holes worked into bedrock. On a November 2018 visit, members of the Grant County Archaeological Society stopped at Frying Pan Canyon and then Pony Hills, north of Deming. Their field account records those holes, rock images at both places, a macaw figure at Pony Hills, and the steep, stony setting. It also records hunters, evidence of target shooting, and a rattlesnake. The article is not an archaeological excavation report, but its direct observations make the places real in a way that a list of “mystery symbols” cannot.
Despite the society’s name, both sites are in Luna County, not Grant County. A National Park Service National Historic Landmark nomination identifies Frying Pan Canyon, archaeological site LA5376, north of Deming, and Pony Hills in the same county. They belong in a guide for Silver City readers because they are within the larger southwest New Mexico region and have been visited by Grant County researchers. Their setting, source record, and access questions deserve separate treatment from the Dragonfly Trail in Grant County and the Lower Scorpion pictographs in Catron County.
Two places, not one panel
The phrase “Frying Pan and Pony Hills” often appears as a single outing. That convenience can hide the distinction between the places. Frying Pan Canyon is a drainage and rock-art setting where the archaeology society noticed many substantial grinding holes. Pony Hills is a sandstone outcrop landscape with an array of carved figures. At one place, animal-track imagery stands out in a federal scholarly comparison; at the other, anthropomorphized forms described as tadpoles with teeth stand out. Neither observation says all other imagery is absent. It identifies features a researcher found prominent enough to use in a regional argument.
The NPS Hueco Tanks nomination places the two sites in a discussion of Jornada rock imagery across the Southwest. It notes abundant animal tracks at Frying Pan and the conspicuous tadpole-like figures at Pony Hills. A 1993 Bureau of Land Management resource-management plan discusses Pony Hills together with Massacre Peak in the Cooke’s Range and describes numerous pecked figures on sandstone outcrops. The plan calls those panels representative of Mimbres culture and names animal, human, and geometric forms. These labels reflect different purposes and scales of classification. The plan speaks to management of a district; the NPS nomination compares motif patterns across sites. Neither gives an individual carved figure a certain date or private meaning.
The BLM plan also records a hard fact about preservation: panels in that area were vulnerable to vandalism and removal with chisels. Its proposal to interpret the places through signs and tours does not, by itself, prove that a current self-guided route exists. A plan can describe desired future work. The present visitor needs current agency information, a land-status check, and permission for any private crossing. The distinction matters because the same paragraph can tempt one reader to see a public attraction and another to see a protected site; only a current land-manager instruction settles access.
Frying Pan’s tracks and worked stone
Animal tracks are a striking form of image because they can point in a direction without being an arrow. A pecked set of prints may evoke an animal that passed through, an account of movement, a relationship with hunting, a ritual practice, or something else the maker understood. The NPS nomination’s statement that tracks are abundant at Frying Pan is a description of motif frequency, not a translation of a message. To turn frequency into meaning one would need contextual evidence: panel composition, orientation, relationships to other forms, chronology, and, where available, interpretations from descendant communities. The landscape can help formulate those questions; it cannot answer them alone.
The 2018 society visit drew special attention to large, deep grinding holes throughout the Frying Pan site. Bedrock grinding features are evidence of repeated physical action at particular surfaces. They may relate to preparation of plant foods, pigments, or other materials depending on form and context, but an unmeasured hole in a photograph cannot be assigned one use. A long-lived place may contain holes made in different periods for different purposes. The careful observation is that worked stone and rock imagery occur together in the broader place. That makes the site more than a wall of motifs; it was part of lived activity.
Depth matters, but not in the simplistic sense that a deeper hole must be older. Rock hardness, tool form, how often a surface was used, and whether the hole was reworked all affect its shape. Some holes could have accumulated over many visits. Without a mapped inventory and residue or wear analysis, a travel writer cannot count years from depth. The physical fact still enriches the scene. Imagine people returning to a reliable work surface, processing something that required patience, looking out over the same hills where others had made marks on rock. That is a historically plausible way to think about continuity, clearly separated from an invented scene with named makers and dialogue.
The association of worked bedrock and images is not unique to one canyon. An Old Pueblo Archaeology Center discussion of mortars and rock art quotes archaeologist Marc Thompson reporting mortars at ten of thirteen rock-art sites he had visited in the Mimbres region. That small sample cannot prove a universal rule, and it says nothing by itself about why any one image was placed beside a worked surface. It does show why an observer should record both kinds of evidence rather than cropping the mortars out of a photograph. A place can have labor, food, social gathering, and image-making in its history without our knowing exactly how those acts were related.
The work surfaces also resist a common visual mistake. A round bedrock hole can look like a deliberately carved symbol from a distance. Its position, cross-section, polish, and wear may identify a different kind of activity. Conversely, a circular pecked image on an upright panel is not automatically a mortar. Context is the first test. A useful field notebook would separate “hole on a horizontal working surface” from “circle incised on a vertical panel,” sketch their relative positions, and preserve uncertainty about use. The writer should not promise that every hole was a food-grinding station or every circle an astronomical sign.
Frying Pan has also appeared under more than one place name in regional writing. An Old Pueblo Archaeology Center tour account associates it with Cooke’s or Massacre Canyon and the Butterfield trail country. Historic route names, drainage names, and archaeological site names can overlap without being exact synonyms on every map. This is a place to verify rather than to merge labels casually. A traveler should not assume that any map point called “Massacre Canyon” is the petroglyph locality, and a historical event near a route does not date the much older rock imagery along it.
The Butterfield Overland Mail operated from 1858 to 1861, according to the National Park Service trail history. It crossed a landscape people already knew. Stage traffic added its own layer of roads, stations, and later stories, but it did not create the older pecked panels. The Park Service also warns that today’s historic trail route crosses a patchwork of public and private ownership. A national historic trail designation is an account of significance, not a continuous public right of way. That is especially relevant where a modern visitor tries to connect an old stage corridor with a rock-art site by following an unverified track across the basin.
Pony Hills: a crowded sandstone record
At Pony Hills, the forms that attract one observer are not necessarily the forms another will choose. The NPS comparison draws attention to toothy tadpole-like anthropomorphs. The 2018 society group singled out a macaw figure. The BLM plan lists animals, human forms, and geometric designs across the Pony Hills and Massacre Peak group. This is a rich collection of images rather than one famous emblem. A person who sees only a single cropped photograph misses the relationships among figures, blank stone, slope, and neighboring panels.
The macaw deserves care. Macaws were meaningful in Southwestern exchange networks, and a clearly documented bird image can open questions about relationships stretching far beyond the Deming basin. The society called one Pony Hills petroglyph a macaw. That is a firsthand identification from a field visit, not a lab test of species. Beak, tail, posture, and comparison with other dated imagery would be relevant to a fuller analysis. Nor does a macaw image by itself prove that living macaws were kept beside that specific panel. An image can remember, invoke, or represent something far away. It remains a compelling clue without having to carry an entire trade history on its own.
The tadpole-like figures present another interpretive trap. A formal resemblance is not a literal zoological label. The NPS nomination calls them “anthropomorphized,” a reminder that human-like and animal-like traits can be combined. Some Southwestern images join attributes that a modern viewer expects to stay separate. Even a comparison across Jornada sites is a scholarly hypothesis about traditions and visual patterns, not a universal cipher. A line that looks like teeth in a photograph may also be affected by weathering or the angle of light. Good study begins with a faithful recording of the panel before assigning a name to every component.
The BLM’s 2022 New Mexico heritage report said its Site Watch program was being reactivated from Silver City to help monitor frequently visited places including Pony Hills, identified there as LA5230. That brief administrative detail tells us two things. People do reach the site, and managers have recognized a need to watch over it. Neither fact means readers should seek out unmarked panels without checking access. Frequent visitation can be a reason to strengthen stewardship rather than to publish a more exact route.
The older BLM plan gives an even wider frame. It describes the Cooke’s Range Area of Critical Environmental Concern as a landscape containing Fort Cummings, Pony Hills, and Massacre Peak, with cultural, biological, and scenic values under the same management umbrella. The fort was established in the nineteenth century; the petroglyphs belong to a different historical layer. Combining them on a management map is sensible, but combining them into a single origin story would be misleading. One can read the range as a place traversed, occupied, and reinterpreted in different eras without making each carved line a clue to the fort or stage route.
Why cultural labels differ
A visitor may find one source using “Mimbres,” another using “Jornada Mogollon,” and a third using the broader “Mogollon.” That does not automatically mean one source is a fraud. Archaeologists use labels for regions, time periods, material patterns, and graphic styles. These do not align perfectly with county boundaries or the boundaries of communities in the past. The Old Pueblo Archaeology Center’s trip report notes similarities between images at the sites and motifs on Mimbres black-on-white pottery, while citing Polly Schaafsma’s classification of the rock art as Jornada Mogollon style. Similarity on pottery is evidence for comparison, not proof that the same maker produced both objects.
A style name can be useful if it tells us which features are being compared. It becomes a problem when it is used as if it identifies an individual painter, family, language, or precise year. It can also erase later use of the same place. There may be older and younger panels, recarving, or historic marks within one landscape. Even a well-known form might have been copied or adapted by people with different ties to the place. A careful caption can say a panel has been discussed in Jornada/Mimbres scholarship and cite the comparison. It should not turn that broad discussion into a false certainty about one glyph.
Comparing a black-on-white bowl design with a petroglyph requires more than noticing that both have a long-beaked bird or a serpent. A ceramic vessel can come from a dated archaeological context; a rock surface may not. A painter works in dark slip on a light bowl, while a carver works against the color and shape of sandstone. The same broad motif may be altered by each medium. A researcher can compare the details of bodies, eyes, limbs, and framing, then ask how securely the vessel itself was dated. This kind of comparison can support a regional historical argument. It cannot produce an exact birth date for the rock image or the name of its maker.
The same restraint applies to oral accounts. A living community may have a relationship to these places, and its interpretation should be presented in its own words and with consent, not generated by a writer who imagines what “Native people believed.” The absence of a published account in the sources used here is a limit of this article, not evidence that such relationships do not exist. Where research has not reached the people entitled to explain a place, the story should remain open.
Reading rock images without making a treasure map
The history of overland travel and later mining in the region makes these places magnets for treasure stories. A track, spiral, cross, or line can be made to look like a directional code once a destination has been chosen in advance. But an old route near a panel does not establish that the panel was carved for a nineteenth-century traveler. If a figure predates the Butterfield route by centuries, it cannot have been designed to guide that stagecoach. If a figure’s date is uncertain, a claim of a particular cache still needs independent evidence tying the carved surface to a documented person and event. Shape alone is not enough.
Readers interested in actual claims about marks used by prospectors and treasure seekers can use our treasure symbols hub. It distinguishes historical documentation from later symbol charts. For Frying Pan and Pony Hills, the strongest records concern rock art and archaeological landscape, not hidden goods. Treating a panel as a puzzle to be solved by digging would also put the site at risk. The BLM’s record of chisel damage shows that harm to such places is not hypothetical.
A landscape to approach carefully
The society’s field account has a vivid practical texture: uneven climbs, broad views, sun, a centipede, and a rattlesnake. Those details matter because a person seeking only a photograph can underestimate the terrain. A club visit in mild November weather is not a promise that the same route will be comfortable in summer heat or after rain. Sandstone slopes and unpaved approaches can be difficult to navigate, and a map line does not certify a road’s current condition. The BLM public-land maps can help establish broad land patterns, but parcel status, road access, and site-specific rules still need to be checked with the field office.
Here this article deliberately stops short of turn-by-turn driving instructions or coordinates for individual panels. The NPS scholarship and society trip establish the sites; the BLM documents Pony Hills as a management concern. None of the cited sources is a current official route guide promising general access to every panel. If an authorized tour or updated land-manager guide is available, use that. If access crosses private land, obtain permission. Do not treat the path followed by a club with leaders as an open road for independent visitors.
At any permitted viewpoint, preserve the physical context. Stay off boulders bearing imagery and out of archaeological deposits. Never chalk, wet, trace, rub, or touch the lines to improve a photograph. Leave pottery, flakes, stone tools, and other surface material where found; their positions are evidence. If a fresh mark or broken panel is noticed, report it to the land manager rather than broadcasting the exact location. A photograph made from a respectful distance, with the panel and landscape together, often communicates more than a high-contrast close-up that strips away context.
The larger story these places tell
Frying Pan Canyon and Pony Hills show how much southwest New Mexico history can be lost when rock imagery is reduced to a symbol key. Animal tracks at one site invite questions about movement and animal relationships. Deep grinding holes ask what work people returned to do. A macaw-like bird at the other site opens questions of travel, memory, and exchange. Composite human and animal forms resist the modern urge to make every figure literal. Sandstone surfaces preserve some marks and lose others; later roads and visitors change the circumstances in which they are seen.
The strongest account keeps several layers visible at once. The petroglyphs are material traces made by people; the neighboring worked stone and landforms are part of the setting; NPS and BLM documents show how institutions classify and manage the sites; the archaeological society records what a particular group observed in 2018. None of those sources gives the last word on every figure. Together they make a better history than a confident single-sentence “translation” could. The sites deserve both curiosity and limits: ask precise questions, keep the original stone undisturbed, and allow the evidence to be as complex as the people who left it.
For a reader planning to learn more, the next step is a source comparison rather than a search for a secret panel. Put the NPS motif descriptions beside the BLM’s preservation concerns and the society’s dated observations. Notice which facts are repeated and which are particular to one source’s purpose. The result is a clearer picture of two distinct places and a more useful set of questions for a museum, ranger, or authorized guide.
Sources and access notes
- National Park Service, Hueco Tanks National Historic Landmark nomination: places both sites in Luna County and compares their prominent motifs with other Jornada sites.
- Bureau of Land Management, 1993 Mimbres Resource Area Resource Management Plan: Pony Hills and Massacre Peak landscape, image forms, preservation concerns, and proposed management.
- BLM New Mexico 2022 heritage report: Pony Hills monitoring through Site Watch.
- Grant County Archaeological Society, 2018 field trip: firsthand observations of grinding holes, macaw petroglyph, terrain, and visit conditions.
- Old Pueblo Archaeology Center, Mimbres country tour account: a guided visit and the distinction between motif comparison and a style classification.
- Old Pueblo Archaeology Center, mortars and rock art: regional comparison of worked bedrock and image sites.
- National Park Service, Butterfield Overland Trail FAQ: dates of the mail service and the mixed ownership of the route today.