Temani Pesh-Wa Petroglyph Display

Temani Pesh-Wa is a self-guided display of Indigenous petroglyph and pictograph panels at Horsethief Lake in Columbia Hills Historical State Park. It’s a worthwhile stop if you want to see the art up close and understand what the river corridor held before its original sites were flooded. The stones are arranged beside a paved path, behind a protective fence, with signs that explain the images and their first settings.

Petroglyphs were pecked or scratched into stone; pictographs were painted. Look for human and animal figures, birds, lizards, stars and circles among the designs. Give yourself time to compare one panel with another, rather than treating the display as a quick roadside sign. This is the self-guided Temani Pesh-Wa display, not the separate She Who Watches site, which can only be visited on its own reserved ranger tour.

The images come from Petroglyph Canyon sites that would have been submerged when The Dalles Dam reservoir rose. Most panels were removed in 1957, and a cooperative project involving treaty tribes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Washington State Parks moved them to this display in 2003. Interpretive signs help connect the stones to their original canyon settings. That context matters: the display lets you study the carvings closely, but it cannot reproduce the places and river landscape they came from.