Sometimes you wander through the desert and find a bounty of pictographs tucked into a small overhang or in a hollow in an otherwise very ordinary looking boulder.
Other times, your heart beats a little faster as you happen upon a magnificent overhanging cliff face and feel sure the jackpot is just ahead … only to find a sparse smattering of tiny elements, if anything!
Today’s site is in that latter category. It looks magnificent from a distance but it turns out that the entire rock holds a few fitful little pictographs and nothing else!
Still, no pigment on a rock is uninteresting to me, so let’s have a look at what’s on display.
Every pictograph at the site is in this photo, along with, oh, 2% of the cliff face? If that?
Let’s start over on the left and work our way to the right, where the most interesting pictographs are. Not that this element, faded as it is, isn’t interesting. Check out the DStretch image if you can’t make it out with the naked eye.
It’s a little “half-burst” with four rays! It was carefully fitted onto the nub on rock face.
To the right of the half-burst ( barely visible in the upper left in this photo ) is a group of three elements. Some of the rock has flaked away so the designs are no longer complete.
The upper right image is smudged and had its center taken out by exfoliation, but the other two are still crisp, though also affected by the flaky rock face. They might even have been part of the same element back when they were made – note the speck of pigment between the two.
The four elements we’ve seen so far. It was in the previous photo too, but take another look at the circular indentation to the right of the elements. It might be a cupule, slowly ground into the granite over time. These are a very old form of rock art – though not all cupules are ancient, some cupules predate petroglyphs and pictographs.
Over on the right side of the cliff is a hollow with the most intricate elements inside it. There is a nice little burst element right at the back of the hollow. This cliff faces generally easterly.
A bit of Dstretch. Maybe a tiny little rake in the lower left? The element with the long trailing line seems like it has a row of dots at its upper end, also forming a rake of sorts.
Let’s step back a little bit. Note the smudged line a bit higher up? These trailing lines are found every so often at pictograph sites, often high up on the rock face. There’s a nice example at the “Shooting Star” site and also at Burham Canyon.
Okay, before you go I have to share a story from this site visit. Like I said, this site is under an enormous cliff. I thought that there was probably more pictographs somewhere around there – I mean, this entire big overhang and cliff and only these few tiny elements? So I clambered around a bit. There was a steepish slope to scale ( on these steep, slick granite slopes boots with Vibram soles really help keep your tailbone intact ) before I could walk around on the upper level, close to the roof of the overhang. There was a pretty big crack up there that I wanted to inspect ( after all, I had big success with this method once before ). And it looked like there was some passages deeper in under the cliff that I could wriggle through.
All that changed as soon as I got up by the crack and saw what was going on up there! Check this out:
What is that stuff piled up on the rock??? Melted bat poop? Melted rat poop? Both? Neither? Maybe melted bat-rat poop mixed with honey? Ick ick ick.
Nasty-nasty. Not crawling under rocks when this stuff is all over the place! Has “disease vector” written all over it. With a touch of the old-timey plague mixed in no doubt.
Yeah, you bet I wasn’t going to do anything but slide gently right back down the rock and start packing up after seeing all that!
This site is a fun little spot to visit, even though it is small. If you visit, make sure to not touch the pictographs – they are fragile. And if you want to see something icky, head on up that slope and check out that pile of whatever-it-is!