This is a pretty nice site of pictographs and petroglyphs but my main memory of the visit is of being miserably itchy, since we were plagued by hordes of no-see-ums! They had a great time finding spots to land and had a feast wherever they ended up. With long sleeves and a bug net the visit would have been better, but we did not expect to be swarmed and were not prepared at all!
Boy, it is a good thing this site is easy to get to because we were tired when we visited it! The previous day was a long one, with about ten miles of 100% cross-country scrambling over terrain that was almost never flat.
The site sits in a wash that is a popular spot for the local ATV riders and you can basically drive right up to it, which we did. Don’t try it in a passenger vehicle though. You’d get stuck within the first ten feet once you leave pavement. I think this is the sandiest wash I’ve ever been to.
Obviously this site will be known to the locals if it is right next to a dirt road. There are quite a few sites around that are well-known and yet not within National Parks for protection. Some of them, like the Golden Hills pictograph site, are kept pristine. Others, like the Coyote Hole Petroglyph site, suffered vandalism and willful damage in the past but are now under the local community’s protection. Yet others were or still are a hotspot for vandalism, graffiti and neglect.
Early Autumn can be pretty toasty in California’s desert regions, and last September saw us head out to a petroglyph site while wishing the weather was maybe 15 to 20 degrees cooler. On top of that, we weren’t sure if what we would find would be worth it! We’d read some site descriptions from other visitors, and while those descriptions stressed the sheer quantity of petroglyphs, they also mentioned disquieting phrases like “poorly pecked” and “indistinct”. Still, we wouldn’t know what was there until we went to look, would we?
There are plenty of theories about the Iron Door Cave. Perhaps Bill Keys, the pioneering rancher whose name looms large in Joshua Tree National Park’s recent history, built it as a prison for his schizophrenic son. Or maybe it was a cold storage room. Or perhaps it was a hidden strong room to secure gold from nearby mines ( or maybe just the dynamite ).
The door was made to be barred from the outside and is very well hidden. Of course it is easy to hide something in the jumbled boulders of the Wonderland of Rocks, but this place is especially well hidden. You can walk right by and not spot it. I know I did just that the first time I was in this area specifically looking for it!
The pictograph site in Burham Canyon is well-known and easy to find – and it shows. Fresh dirt bike tracks run right up to it and empty Coors Light cans are wedged into the cracks in the rock outcropping.
I don’t usually write twice about sites when I revisit them, but this site is so unusual that I thought another entry would be worthwhile here, especially since we found a few additional pictographs on this visit.
This was one of the first sites I ever found, and one of the first sites I ever wrote about.
Now here’s a site that I’ve spent some time hunting for! Even though I first found it years ago, I’m only now getting around to writing about it, after we’ve been back to take some more pictures of it. It is in an area of Joshua Tree National Park I’ve visited often, but it isn’t really obvious. You kind of have to know that it is there.
My only clue to find it was that it was in a hollow rock, so I spent an insane amount of time eyeing the huge granite boulders, wondering whether they were solid or not, and walking around them looking for a way in. How often do you see someone march up to a boulder with a speculative glint in their eye before they start circling it and bending down looking for hidden entrances? Looks like they got a touch to much desert sun to the head when they start doing that, I’ll tell you!
This was one of the most rewarding site hunts I’ve ever had. Over a couple of years I pieced together a variety of small clues, finally discovering one key piece of information that revealed the location. This is one of my favorite things about visiting these sites – the search itself! Just grabbing some coordinates and barreling straight for a site is not as satisfying as doing the legwork towards discovery for myself, and experiencing that moment when all the clues come together to reveal the location.
We visited this site with a fellow desert explorer, Guy Starbuck of starbuck.org.
This little site is hidden deep in the backcountry of Joshua Tree National Park. It look a long slog through vale and gully just to get here, climbing up and around many obstacles, wriggling through manzanita and choosing to bypass this yucca here in favor of that cactus over there, simply because the gap between thorn and boulder seems a little wider over there than down here and besides, have you seen what a yucca leaf can do when you meet it at the wrong angle? Always choose the cactus over the yucca.
This site is located in the middle of some suburban sprawl to the west of Tehachapi. The site was brought public attention by 14-year old Jennifer Dellons in the 1970’s, via a letter she wrote to UCLA because she was concerned that the site might be damaged or destroyed by the development springing up around it. Her letter helped made sure that the site was recorded and preserved.