Celebration Park: From Desert Dump To Cultural Attraction

MELBA, Idaho - The bumper sticker on Tom Bicak's blue Toyota is short and to the point: "Ask to see my atlatl."

It's a teasing invitation to one of Idaho's most unusual parks - Celebration Park, five miles south of Melba, about a 30-to-40 minute drive from Boise.

There are no swings or teeter totters here. And scarcely a tree to shade a picnic table.

But visitors can find their hands full touring petroglyph fields, playing ancient Native American games, making pit-fire pottery and learning to use "atlatls" - prehistoric hunting tools used to propel spears to kill wooly mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.

Bicak, formerly a science teacher at what is now Albertson College of Idaho, proposed the park in the late 1980s. But others were slow to warm to his idea of transforming a dump for shotgun shells, beer bottles and Styrofoam bait containers into an outdoor educational venue.

"People said it was the dumbest thing they'd ever heard of," Bicak recalls. "`Why put a park in the desert? No one wants to go to the desert,' they said."

But Bicak persisted, and people are coming. In one recent year, the park attracted about 75,000 people.

"What I really want to do is preserve the cultural resources down here," says Bicak, who is now the curator for the Canyon County park. "You could do that by putting a chain link fence around here and keeping everyone out. Or you can educate children about what's here so that when they get older they won't come down and trash it."

The park on the north side of the Snake River is believed to have been a winter home for Native Americans for some 12,000 years. At least, that's what the carbon dating of etchings early inhabitants left on massive, dark boulders scattered around the area would indicate. The campground stretched for three miles along the north side of the river, which the Indians plowed for salmon and mussels.

Today the park is part of the largest archaeological district in the United States. It boasts one of the nation's most diverse, extensive, undisturbed set of petroglyphs.

"It's unique because you have the Great Basin culture coming together here with people from the Columbia Plateau. You see elements of the Southwest and the Northwest in one place," Bicak says.

The "Bonneville melon gravel" early inhabitants marked with graffiti was deposited by the Bonneville Flood believed to have torn through the canyon 12,000 years ago on its rampage from Utah to the Pacific Ocean. Four times as much water as the Amazon River discharges annually went through the canyon in six weeks, Bicak says.

Researchers from the Utah Rock Art Research Association speculate that some of the rock etchings correspond to phenomenon like the summer solstice. Marble-sized holes in the rocks called cupules are believed to be associated with vision quests.

The uninitiated revel in spotting recurring carvings resembling the Greek symbol for "pi," wavy squiggles and fishhooks with dots, three-and four-fingered handprints and "rakes," which Bicak speculates may have been a measuring stick for fish. One petroglyph resembles a typewriter; another, a polka dot teepee with a TV antenna sticking out of the top. Still another, a fish in a fish trap.

Bicak points to a carving resembling a dragonfly.

"You find elements like this all over Polynesia, which I find fascinating. I spend a lot of time sitting out here and wondering: What did they do here?

The boulders aren't the only reminder of those who used to live here. Anthills give archaeologists clues for finding habitat sites.

Ants can't tolerate sharp edges so the workers cart off flakes of obsidian, projectile points and shells and pottery fragments from the queen's underground chambers, leaving them scattered on the ground above, Bicak says.

Bicak has a display of arrowheads, mastodon bones and other artifacts found in the area to show those who stop by the park's visitor center.

He's also ready and willing to give visitors hands-on demonstrations, building duck decoys from bulrush and chipping stones into arrowheads with obsidian.

Many of the park's visitors linger at least five hours to participate in the various activities.

"That's a long visit when you consider an average visit to the Grand Canyon is 17 minutes," Bicak says. "But, even then, you've only scratched the surface of what we have to offer."

Plenty to keep you busy

Here are just some of the things you can do at Celebration Park:

-- Take an early morning birdwatching walk through the area, which is located at the western edge of the Snake River Birds of Prey area.

Morning and early evening are the best times to spot raptors circling the area in search of breakfast or dinner. Hundreds of 2-foot-tall pelicans migrate to the area in May and June and spend the rest of the summer. Geese nest in the islands year round. Many of the area's other 200 species of birds, including bald eagles, nest in the cliffs above the river.

-- Tour the petroglyphs. Wees Bar, eight miles upriver on the south side of the river, is loaded with rocks so tattooed with petroglyphs that they look like quilts. More petroglyphs can be found just west of the park parking lot and east of the visitor center.

-- Stop and smell the . . . wildflowers. Among the interesting plants of the area: greasewood, which Indians ground up each spring to make gruel for soup. The plant becomes toxic and inedible as the season progresses.

For more information about the park and other activities offered there, call 208-495-2745.