Petroglyphs are less often seen in Joshua Tree National Park than pictographs are but this doesn’t mean they are not there, or are rarer. They’re just harder to find, out in the quiet nooks and crannies of the Park.
This companion site to the more well-known Red Lady or “Lone Woman of the Cave” site in Joshua Tree National Park is located in the same general vicinity.
It is also thought to depict the Chemehuevi legend of Tavapëtsi, the Sun, impregnating a woman with rays of sunlight ( specifically, the fan of light that can be seen shining down from the sun when the atmospheric conditions are just right ). The legend claims that the woman birthed twin sons for Tavapëtsi. In general, the legend is tied to the spring equinox and the period of fertility spring brings to nature.
One of the challenges of backcountry exploration is that you often don’t arrive at your destination during a good time of day for photography. Sometimes, the winter sun is kind of weak and everything appears washed out. Other times, the angle of the sun is such that every surface seems to shimmer with a bright glare , making it very hard to get good photos.
I found this site during a time of day that was certainly not conductive to good photography! Maybe I’ll head back at some point to try and capture better pictures since I think the area probably has more to offer!
I first visited this site about three years ago in the dead of winter. During our first visit we encountered the remnants of a recent cold snap: little drifts of snow and frozen tanks of water. Most people don’t associate Joshua Trees and towering White Tank granite boulders with snow, but if you visit Joshua Tree National Park at the right time you’re in for a surprising treat.
During that visit we crunched our way up the frozen washes. Instead of slogging through soft sand we were walking on top of frozen sand! We made our way past frozen pools of water and carefully scrambled over icy boulders. Granite is slick enough when dry – add a nice layer of ice on top and you risk your tailbone with every scramble.
What if I told you that Joshua Tree National Park has one of the finest car washes I’ve ever been to? You’d think I’d gone a bit funny in the head from all the heat and fresh desert air, wouldn’t you?
Yet it is true. Every word of it.
Below, I submit my evidence for your consideration.
The Volcanic Tablelands north of Bishop is one of those places you either know and love or have no idea exists.
For rock climbers and desert wanderers it is an exciting spot, offering many problems to work and remote places to explore, respectively.
For everyone else it is dreadfully dull, something to be zipped by ( going downhill ) or crept past ( going uphill ) as you navigate the steep Sherwin Grade on the nearby US 395.
In many ways the shield design is the defining element found in the Great Basin. Rectilinear elements are also really common – not to mention the famous Coso bighorn sheep representations further south – but the shield design pops up at sites all over the region.
This particular site consists of almost nothing but shield designs. The main site consists of eleven well-defined shields on a large upright boulder with a smooth, level north face, and some less well-executed elements lower on the same rock face.
Several of the sites I’ve written about ( and some of the ones I haven’t written about and hope to one day write about! ) are sites that I’ve been hunting for a while: through tedious and meticulous research I gradually build up an idea of where I should go look, and then I head out and look and look and look, and often come away with no more than a pile of “well, it is not here, here or here” to add to my data set!
This is one of the earliest pictograph sites I found, right at the beginning of my interest in hunting for these sites. Back then I carried a dinky compact camera in my pocket and very little knowledge of site photography in my head.
Despite their poor quality ( so poor that I’d never actually post them here! ) I enjoy looking at the photos I took of this site back then because they remind me vividly of what it felt like to discover this site for the first time – the excitement of peering up at it in the gathering dusk and realizing that the overhang contained paintings, the hurried scurrying about trying to find a route up, and finally peering into the shelter with a big smile before snapping a few hurried shots and hightailing it out of there before dark traps me in the backcountry. ( Back then I seemingly had a talent for discovering sites at the last possible moment, turning a sweaty day of frustration into a highlight at the last moment. )
The meaning of Native American rock art is poorly understood. The ethnographic record, combined with thoughtful research, have suggested meanings to us – some still considered current, others fallen out of favor: boundary markers, hunting magic, shamanistic recordings of vision quests, markings for shaman’s caches … there is a long list of possible interpretations.
Part of the debate is whether pictograph and petroglyph sites were held sacred, created in hidden corners of the world, or whether they shared living space with the people who created them.