These Ancient Etchings Should be Open to Visitors All Year
The Sanillac Petroglyphs are only open to visitors during the summer, even though they survived out in the open for thousands of years
Cass City — Deep in the middle of nowhere, off a road most of us would never take, is a parking lot that opens to a trail. If you take it, you can see something ancient that’s been preserved through the years. But you can only view it in the summer.
The Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic State Park is tucked away toward the top of Michigan’s thumb, and while the petroglyphs are only open in the summer, the hiking is year-round. Why?
When I tried to visit the petroglyphs this week, I was greeted with a large brown sign that said they were only open in the summer, between Memorial and Labor Day weekends. Maybe that’s on me for not looking more closely at the website.
But after doing more research into the history of the petroglyphs, it seems like a rock that was open to the elements for thousands of years could probably handle being open to the public year-round.
Petroglyphs are the formal word for rock carvings. Pictographs are when colors are used. Here, under the gazebo shelter in the right season, you can see etchings in sandstone without added colorations.
At some point, the state replaced the traditional wood sign you see everywhere that said “Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic State Park” with a more modern one that reads: “Ezhibiigaadek Asin,” which means “written on stone” in Ojibwe.
While historians estimate indigenous tribes may have used the site intermittently for the last 8,000 years, the stone carvings were made within the last 1,400 years.
Only in the last 20 or so has the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan come back to the site. And it says the rock’s carvings of an archer, a water panther, and an eagle man have incredible cultural significance.
Nobody knew about the petroglyphs until a wildfire burned much of this part of the thumb in the 1880s. After the fires cleared out the woods, settlers discovered the stone carvings.
About 40 years later, archeologists started looking at the site and determined people lived here thousands of years before settlers ever saw it. The history we have of the site has come out of the ground.
Shannon Martin, an elder in residence at Western Michigan University and the founder of Cultural Pathways Group, LLC, told the Detroit Free Press in a feature 10 years ago that the native Americans forgot about the rock because of the upheaval from European settlers.
In the late 1980s, a pavilion was erected over the carvings. Now that the sun and rain aren’t beating down on the rock, the hard part is keeping the lichen off of it. The state also closes it for winter to try to keep ice and snow away from the carvings.
Paradoxically, Martin told the reporter in 2016 that a spiritual leader could “re-etch” the rock face if they decided it was necessary to preserve their teachings to the next generation.
So why should the state bother with keeping it covered all year if leaders can re-etch it and keep their rediscovered traditions alive in the process? It doesn’t really make sense both ways.
Either way, it should be open all year. It’s one of the most interesting natural landmarks in this part of the state and there has to be a way to put it on view for everyone to see no matter the season.
The largest collection of petroglyphs in the state is well worth the time and the trip in the summer. And in the meantime, it’s worth poking around in the woods near you. You never know what you might find.
