After a few miles of wandering, poking around rock piles, and ducking in under various boulder overhangs or into various nooks and crannies, we happened upon a small pictograph and petroglyph site. Since we looked all over the surrounding area I’m fairly sure that there’s no other sites really close to this one, and there was no signs of a habitation site either.
It is not very often that you come across a headless digitate anthropomorph in the backcountry … well, come to think of it, maybe it’s not that unlikely if you do the kind of thing I do!
So … should you be in a situation where this might happen to you, make sure to have your camera on hand so you can take its picture.
We visited this petroglyph site in mid-spring, on what turned out to be a pretty hot day. Instead of taking the Rings Loop trail, we parked in a different spot and approached the petroglyphs from the other side. This lead to a bit of consternation on my part, since the petroglyphs are all on the far side of the boulders, except for one very small panel, and I thought that we drove all the way out here for a couple of petroglyphs and I would have to apologize to my companion for creating such a journey for the sake of two petroglyphs!
This is a smallish site on the Volcanic Tablelands. We first found this site late one freezing winter morning. We had started our day driving out from June Lake and south down the 395, and it was a harrowing experience. Overnight snow left 6-8 inches of powder on the 395, which wasn’t closed yet, and it was still coming down hard as we eased down Deadman’s Summit in 4WD. While trying to tell road from snowbank I hoped that the name of the summit wasn’t about to become prophetic!
This is a little site in Tübatulabal territory, on the bank of a seasonal creek. The site is a bit unusual in that the pictographs are not painted on granite. Instead, they are on the side of a slate outcropping on the creek’s eastern bank.
There are also some bedrock mortars down by the creek bed – beautiful conical mortars, worn about ten inches deep. One of the mortars is on a smallish boulder that has washed down the creek since it was originally made. We know this because the boulder is now wedged at an angle in the creek bed. There are also a couple of grinding slicks on a nearby boulder.
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.
Sometimes, pictograph sites are vibrant and impressive. Other times, the remaining pigment needs careful attention and some deliberate work with DStretch before you can see what used to be. Today’s site falls in that category.
The Pinto Wye Arrastra in Joshua Tree National Park is one of the many well-preserved artifacts of Western mining and ranching in the Park that can still be seen today.
An arrastra is a type of mill that was used to pulverize ore. Most of the ones I’ve seen follow a simple design: a circular pit lined with flat stones, and a shaft with connected drag stones on a pivot above the pit. The shaft is then spun in some way to pull the drag stones around in the pit and process the ore. Sometimes burros or human power was used, and in later times gasoline engines.