Just in time for the latest controversy over developments around Nine Mile Canyon, photographer Diane Orr is showing off the beauty of the canyon's ancient rock art.

An exhibit of the Salt Lake photographer's prints, "The Nine Mile Canyon Gallery," opens Thursday evening and continues through Sept. 18 at Ken Sanders Rare Books, 268 S. 200 East.

The photos are a haunting illustration of a place the Bureau of Land Management Price Field Office has termed "the greatest concentration of rock art sites in the U.S.A."

Taken with a panoramic camera, each photo measures 10 inches high by 42 inches long. They show the sweep of the desert canyon environment and the stunning rock art panels in their natural settings.

During the exhibit's opening, 7 p.m. Thursday, Deseret Morning News reporter Jerry Spangler will read from the upcoming book by himself and his wife, reporter Donna Kemp Spangler, "Horns, Snakes and Axle Grease: A Guide to the History, Archaeology and Rock Art of Nine Mile Canyon."

Spangler, who is also an archaeologist, said one panel may date from Archaic times, about 2,000 years ago. At other sites in the canyon that have been tested, "the radiocarbon dates come in between 900 and 1300 AD," he said.

Other works show Ute Indians on horseback, art that must date to after 1776. Spangler said the Utes did not have horses in 1776 (when Spaniards came through Utah) but acquired them a few years later.

Nine Mile Canyon is a misnomer, as many of the most spectacular panels are in a 24-mile corridor between Wellington, Carbon County, and Myton, Duchesne County.

Orr is a filmmaker who earlier produced a movie about the young artist Everett Ruess, who disappeared in southern Utah in 1934. She has been photographing Nine Mile Canyon for years, "but only got really serious about it a couple of years ago."

She borrowed a panoramic camera and started taking amazing photos of the rock art in its setting. She loved the camera "and finally got my own," she said in a telephone interview.

Larry Cesspooch, a Ute storyteller and spiritual leader who is to speak at the opening, went into the canyon with her and was "just astonished by the amount of Ute work," she said.

Looking at some of the art, "He said these are Ute shields . . . absolutely." Cesspooch was able to relate living people to art that stretches back hundreds of years.

During the recent summer solstice, Orr watched the morning sun shine on rock panels in the canyon. It would light up "mountain sheep after mountain sheep," hammered into the rock walls in the distant past.

The ancient rock was created in a time and by a culture so different from our own that examining it requires a mental stretch, she said. It is "an opportunity to peek outside of our own age and our way of thinking. I'm not sure I can do it, but I like to try."