Columbia Hills State Park (Tsagaglalal)
Columbia River Gorge, Washington, United States
A Columbia River Gorge state park holding Tsagaglalal, the pictograph known as She Who Watches, viewable only on ranger-guided tours, alongside relocated petroglyph panels that were saved before The Dalles Dam flooded the river's rock art gallery.
On the bluffs above Horsethief Lake in the Columbia Hills Historical State Park, a painted face with wide round eyes looks out from the rock. Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches, is the best known image in the gorge's rock art tradition, tied to a Wasco-Wishram story in which a woman was transformed into stone to watch over her people. The panel sits in a landscape that was a major Chinookan settlement area: Lewis and Clark recorded numerous wooden houses here in October 1805, and the river corridor between The Dalles and Celilo Falls was one of the great Native trade and fishery centers of the Pacific Northwest. Washington State Parks, which merged Horsethief Lake State Park and Dalles Mountain Ranch into the park in 2003, treats the pictograph area as a protected cultural site.
Access is deliberately managed: the main panel can only be reached on guided walks, which run seasonally on scheduled dates, led by park staff and volunteers, with no pets, no leaving the trail, and consultation with tribal cultural staff required for any commercial filming. The park's Temani pesh-wa trail displays petroglyph panels moved from sites flooded after The Dalles Dam was completed in 1957, part of a salvage effort that saved some carvings while the rising reservoir drowned the famous gallery at Celilo. Horsethief Lake itself is on the National Register of Historic Places, and climbing areas near the butte are signed off-limits for cultural resource protection.
Visiting
Washington State Parks runs the park: open 6:30 am to dusk year-round, with the Horsethief Lake area on a winter schedule November through March. A Discover Pass is required ($10 one-day or $45 annual); the She Who Watches tour itself is free. Tours run seasonally, typically spring through fall, on scheduled dates with reservations through the park's calendar; 1.5 hours, 0.75-mile round trip over rough rock with grade, no shade, no pets.
Photo: [CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tsagaglalal.jpg). Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories