This is a spectacularly large rock shelter, but unfortunately it is extensively vandalized and damaged by illegal camp fires. On top of that, the graffiti that used to be there was cleaned up by power washing the shelter! Yikes, that couldn’t have been good for the pictographs.
Despite all this damage … if you take the time to look closely, you can still find the remnants of some pictographs on the walls. The number of elements is very low for the size of the shelter, and mostly consists of burst elements. This shelter probably made a very good living area during the summer months. Maybe that is why it wasn’t covered in a whole lot of pictographs.
Part of the large shelter. This photo is taken from up on a ledge under the shelter – this thing is about 12 feet tall at its apex!
With the naked eye you really don’t see much unless you get right up against the rock face. Take some time to see if you can spot any pigment anywhere in this picture of the back wall.
This DStretch enhancement shows where the elements are.
Let’s get in close on the individual elements. See if you can spot the pigment.
It is a small grouping of burst elements.
Here’s a close-up of one of the bursts. It is painted in a slightly smoother area of the shelter. You have to really get close to see these in the dim light of the overhang. This photo approximates what you see when your eyes have adjusted, and you’re looking at the rock face from really close up.
Quite a precisely-drawn little burst.
Another area of faint red pigment. With the naked eye everything looks kind of smudgy, so let’s see what DStretch can show us.
This is a bigger burst element, and a cross-shaped one.
Actually, there’s more pigment just a little further away, to the left of the cross shape! Let’s look at that. Looks like a half-circle, maybe?
That’s weird – two little hook shapes! I cannot tell if that’s part of a larger, now destroyed element or not.
Now, let’s look at an overview of area we’ve been looking at. As soon as you step away from the rock face the pigment becomes really hard to see.
A DStretch view. Looks like there’s a circle and a line towards the top as well.
It looks like there’s something on the lighter band of rock you could see in the initial overview, too. Let’s look with DStretch.
Yup – some lines. Not very exciting! Sometimes when you spot faint pigment you hope for a real surprise when you run it through DStretch later on. That happens sometimes, but today wasn’t one of those cases.
There’s one area we haven’t looked at yet – up on a lower shelf in the shelter. The elements we spotted so far are in that alcove on the lower right.
That area of red pigment towards the upper left is what we want to get a closer look at.
Ah! Looks pretty interesting.
Yes – this is the most intricate element at the site, for sure. I’ve seen elements like this in Tübatulabal territory, such as the Shooting Star site.
Our explorations at an end, we put the cameras away and turned around to return to our vehicle. Not all sites can be huge and perfectly preserved. But even sites like this that shows a lot of wear has a story to tell. I’m not surprised that this enormous shelter attracted visitors and possibly residents over the years. It is a pity that it attracted so much destructive attention recently, though. If you visit, make sure to keep your hands to yourself but look closely at the shelter walls. Maybe you’ll find something that I missed! The pictographs are very, very faint.