This pictograph site is on a ledge partway up a canyon wall. I’ve known about it for many years and visited it twice, but each time I came away with pictures that were less than satisfactory, so I haven’t written about it yet. This past winter I decided it was time to do something about that!
Today’s post is about a little site that we visited last fall. We struck out north of our usual stomping grounds, ending up in the southwestern counties of Nevada. There is a lot of pre-history here.
In a lonely, wind-swept saddle between two low hills there is a hot spring, with a cold spring higher up the slope. The ground is speckled with lithic scatter, indicating some prehistoric presence here. There are no suitable rock shelters nearby, so any Native American camps would have been open air camps. Continue reading
We were driving along a dirt road somewhere in the windswept heart of Nevada when I thought that a certain random clump of darkly varnished boulders looked promising, so I convinced my companion to pull over so we could have a look. We donned boots and hoisted cameras. It seemed like we were both down to a single pair of socks that weren’t studded with grass seeds, so this better pan out or we’d waste a good pair of socks on nothing!
I forded through the spiky grass and examined the first boulders. Well shoot. Nothing! Still, that barely means anything. As far as the eye could see, there were boulders lurking in the sea of golden grass, waiting to be examined. In this landscape you’d run out of patience, and the will to live, long before you ran out of boulders.