This is a site in Joshua Tree National Park that, as far as I know, have never been surveyed or documented. We were out in the backcountry with our friend Guy Starbuck, enjoying the back country of JTNP, when we noticed something we thought we’d better investigate. Check out his post about this site here.
This was a fun little site to visit! Though smaller than many other petroglyph sites, it has some very fascinating elements.
Most of the petroglyphs at this site are similar in style to others in the vicinity, but the showcase element – the eponymous lizard – is unique. It looks much more like elements found way southwest of here, in Chumash rock art, or in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Yokuts or Tübatulabal territory.
This site is nestled at higher elevation on the slopes of the western Sierra, around 6,500 feet or so. There’s no habitation sites nearby that I’m aware of, and nothing stands out about the landscape. However, the site seems deliberately chosen all the same – this is a rocky little knoll and the boulder it is painted on is the largest in the grouping.
To me the site seems to represent a shaman’s portal into the spirit world: it is painted in a crack in a large, striking boulder. This would have been considered a good spot from which to access the spirit world.
Now here’s a site that was hard to find! I’m not even sure how many trips we made before we found it.
This site is kind of in the middle of nowhere so you have to commit a good chunk of time just to hoof it to the general area, never mind start searching. After we had a couple of unsuccessful attempts at finding it I started analyzing my very vague research more thoroughly. As I found more clues I steadily narrowed down its location until finally I was sure I had it this time! So we set out again to find it. This was going to be the time. It was late afternoon and we were kind of done for the day already but I had the urge to be out in the desert despite my leaden legs, so off we went.
This site is a companion site to the “Be Hip or be Square” pictograph site. They are both in the same mountain range and both painted on a side wall of a mining adit that petered out.
This similarity makes me think that they are contemporary, but this site is more rudimentary than its companion, and the design of the pictographs at the two sites doesn’t really have much in common.
Still, this is another site that we know can at most be as old as the adit, and the adit won’t be older than 1860, a few years before the first forays into mining in this area. Continue reading
Not long ago we came across a most unusual site – pictographs in an old mining adit.
This site, in Serrano territory in Joshua Tree National Park, was an accidental discovery on our part. We just headed out semi-randomly, on a “Let’s see what’s out there!” quest, and after a while our wandering took us down a narrowing wash lined with uninspiring rock piles. We wondered whether we would end up with a dud of a trip!
As we picked our way past yet another obstacle, enthusiasm waning, a troop of rock climbers came up behind us. I didn’t feel like being surrounded by a gaggle of strangers in the middle of nowhere so I suggested we turn back and walk down a different, larger wash we passed a while back instead.
We waved to the climbers ( who seemed as surprised to find us out there as we were to see them. I guess you always assume – or hope – that you will have nature all to yourself when you step off the beaten path ) and retraced our steps.
That turned out to be a good call. Barely a hundred yards down this new wash we struck pay dirt in a big way!
Sometimes you wander through the desert and find a bounty of pictographs tucked into a small overhang or in a hollow in an otherwise very ordinary looking boulder.
Other times, your heart beats a little faster as you happen upon a magnificent overhanging cliff face and feel sure the jackpot is just ahead … only to find a sparse smattering of tiny elements, if anything!
Along a heavily vandalized stretch of varnished rock one of the most interesting sites in the Mohave manages to hang on and escape damage. Among the many petroglyph elements at this site are panels that appear to illustrate a shaman transforming into his animal form.
This site is in Kawaiisu territory, like the Steam Wells site, where a similar theme of a shaman’s experience during a vision quest is depicted.
Close to downtown Joshua Tree, a few hundred yards from the nearest houses, you can find some petroglyphs rivaling any found inside Joshua Tree National Park itself. Though there are plenty of petroglyphs to see in JTNP, if you take the time to find them, the pictograph sites tend to be more impressive.
Coyote Hole is easily accessible and well-known to the locals. There is even a group working actively to protect the site, which is great to hear and also much needed: the wash these petroglyphs are found in is littered with graffiti. As if sporadic vandalism wasn’t enough of a threat the Army Corps of Engineers also stepped in in the 1960’s to help the destruction, blasting parts of the canyon to provide rock to line a nearby highway flood control underpass and destroying some of the petroglyphs in the process.