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 found this pictograph, and its companion, while traveling down a wash one fall afternoon. The afternoon had turned warm and I had drifted towards the potion of the wash that was moving into the shade. Good thing that, because my eye caught something on a large expanse of granite.
Let’s look!
The pictograph is quite faded, and also quite high up on a monolithic expanse of granite. I wonder how the person who painted it got up there! It’s a good 12 feet off the ground. Maybe the ground eroded away at the base of this rock over time.
DStretch confirms that there’s nothing else hiding on the rock face.
By standing on tippy-toes and holding the camera blindly over my head, I capture a more head-on ( sorry ) picture of our friend.
That’s a LOT of digits! Unless you really imagine that there might be some pigment above the figure ( and if you did, how do you explain that the rest of the pigment on this smooth rock face didn’t wash away along with the head? ) there apparently was never a head to this figure. The “foot” on our left turned into a fractal with feet of its own. Even on the right side there is something sticking up from the “foot”. What else in this area seem to randomly generate new appendages? Yucca brevifolia, of course – the Joshua Tree. I wonder if that was the inspiration behind this pictograph’s design.
A little ways further a desert denizen blends in with the granite. Look carefully!
Hello there, little floof! Little prey animal! Fortunately, I’m not a bunny hunter. You’re safe for now, little bunny.
The other ( what I think might be a ) pictograph that we found is not nearly as interesting as the first. After deciding that there is some pigment on this granite I got DStretch out. Results are … kind of inconclusive.
I mean, I think this is a T-shape, and there may be something else in the exfoliated part of the rock – those two or three horizontal blocks of red looks a bit too regular to be natural. But it is really hard to tell.
Well, that was our little adventure for the day! Sometimes you find something large and impressive, and sometimes you find something small, quietly tucked into a corner, forgotten about by most of the world. Regardless of what you find, make sure to not harm it in any way. These little traces of a past culture are irreplaceable.
Looks kind of like a salamander!
You’re right! Ha – I wonder how far back in time you have to go before you’d find salamanders in this area!