I am the kind of person who looks at a topo map and thinks “Oooh, look at this lonely spot way over here, far away from anything! I wonder what it’s like over here?” Oddly named meadows and creeks, hidden little valleys and lakes draw me in.
This is why I sometimes end up on some really silly hikes … way off in the sticks. Sometimes I find nothing but solitude and natural beauty, other times I find something interesting. This entry is the result of one such hike.
Joshua Tree National Park is not particularly large or remote, at least not when measured against West Coast standards. It still has plenty of quiet spots though – and this site is in one of them.
Scale is relative. This is a towering rock pile but the wide-angle shot makes it seem small! The pictograph shelter is a little left of center. Find the yucca in the foreground and scan straight up the photo to the largish light-colored boulder jutting out halfway up the cliff. The shelter is the dark spot under its right tip.
This picture is taken from a spot already partway up the debris pile at the foot of the cliff. The remnants of the ledge that gave access to the shelter are visible at the right. The pictographs are in the lighter-colored overhang under the triangular boulder.
The site name refers to the fact that this is definitely a “road less traveled” kind of place.
Just getting to it requires a good couple hours of sometimes tricky cross-country navigation through a series of gullies and washes, more than once climbing up a ridge and over to a notch to drop down into the next wash, all the while keeping a close eye on the compass. It is really easy to go astray in this area.
The gullies are boulder-choked and peppered with thorny vegetation and the terrain is best described as ‘globally intimidating and locally manageable’: there is always someplace to take your next step but if you look too far ahead it just looks like a hopeless tangle!
At one time the shelter that these pictographs are in was easily accessible, probably via a sloped ledge that could be climbed much like Alister’s Cave or the Diamond Solstice site.
The ledge that gave access to this site has broken off the face the cliff at some point and now the only way to get a glimpse is to scramble up the jumbled debris and peer up at the shelter.
From the ground there isn’t too much to see – a couple of red pictographs if you take the time to stare carefully and see them. Scrambling up the boulders at the foot of the cliff affords a slightly better view.
This angle shows that the shelter has a bit of width to it, even if it is rather shallow. The most visible elements are towards the right of the shelter but there is also some pigment on the ceiling towards the left.
A close look at the most visible elements – a circle of pigment and a zig-zag line. The zig-zag design is a known part of puberty rituals for the tribes that lived in the general area.
I spent a good amount of time looking for a way up before settling for photographs from below.
We scrambled up the boulders at the base of the cliff, handing each other camera gear as we went.
We had been in this area some years before and found these pictographs then but taking little compact camera pictures of them were a useless exercise – they’re up too high!
The pictographs are somewhat smudged, so I poured on the color with DStretch. Now we can see that the circle had hatches, almost like a clock – and it also seems as if there are some other elements in the shelter, seen down below, that were too faded to see from this far away with the naked eye.
This time we were armed with my full arsenal of equipment, including a fiendishly heavy telephoto lens with accompanying tripod.
We have already hauled this stuff through all those washes and up all those steep, crumbly hill sides, and now we had to carefully carry them up the jumbled boulders too, handing them off to each other while nervously saying “Do you have it?” and “Don’t drop it!”
Finally we set up shop atop a somewhat flat boulder, carefully assembling the big camera and telephoto lens as well as the tripod.
The left side of the shelter has a hollow on the ceiling that is filled with two red lines and a faint red smear right at the edge of the shelter. So far the site isn’t revealing much.
Then we delicately danced around each other to get into position for the photography, making sure not to bump into the tripod and send some pretty good money careening down the cliff – and making double sure not to bump into each other and end up in a heap at the foot of the cliff either!
I took multiple pictures of all visible parts of the shelter.
From down below we really could only see the two most visible pictographs in the right hand side of the shelter: the round element and zig-zag I showed photos of already.
Wait – a really close look with DStretch shows three lines in the little hollow, not two! Hauling twenty pounds of camera gear up here was worth it after all!
Staring intently into the alcove revealed a smaller blotch of pigment to the left and some lines in a little hollow on the ceiling, but it seemed like there wasn’t much else to see!
I didn’t believe that such a good, out-of-the-way shelter would hold such a meagre display of pigment – all the effort to get to it, and only a few small elements? It felt unlikely.
Since I can’t climb vertical walls and since I like my neck too much to risk trying to traverse to the ledge from any adjacent features, there really was no good way to take a closer look, so I settled for the next best thing and edged as far out on the boulder as I dared in order to get as good an angle as possible into the shelter.
Well, this is as good as it gets from down below! This is the view from the very edge of the lower boulder, a last attempt to get a view of the pigment below. Yes, down to the left there is definitely something, and there’s another zig-zag line underneath the two easily visible elements.
Back home I turned on DStretch and took a look. And yes! Good find!
Look at that! Down underneath the obvious zigzag line there are at least four more, and it looks as if one of them ( second from the left ) is connected to the line we see up above. The two on either side of it may terminate in circles. There is also definitely a circular element down in the right, as was hinted at in the earlier picture. And that’s not even all. There is a burst-type element, with one triangular tine upper left, to the left of the zig-zag lines, and finally, a long line with crossed bars that looks like it might have ended in a circle too. Several other patches of pigment are too smudged or faint to make out.
A different DStretch algorithm of the same picture gives a slightly different view of the elements.
Finding more elements with DStretch is a lot of fun – like a second discovery! In this case, a hunch paid off. I also have dozens and dozens of pictures of rock faces and boulders that did not pay off, believe me.
After seeing these images I’m fairly sure that we found a puberty ritual site. Although this site is north of what is traditionally considered their territory, the zig-zag lines were often associated with the Luiseño’s female puberty rituals, and red pigment is the color that was used in these rituals, so the elements seem to fit.
Young women would end their ritual by racing to a rock where relatives would wait with pigment, and they would then draw designs, called yunish, on the rock face. This shelter would have been easier to get to when the ledge was still in place, that’s for sure!
If this site was used for a puberty ritual you’d expect a habitation site somewhere in the vicinity, but to my knowledge there is none. That said I haven’t explored a whole lot around it because it is so hard to get to. We’ve put in a full day and while this isn’t the only thing we found ( stay tuned for more ) we did not find anything resembling a habitation site.
In this case there’s little need to warn you not to touch the pigment – you can’t get to it! A better warning would be – don’t try to climb up to the site! Very dangerous, and you will be miles from help if you fell. Nobody would hear you shout for help.