I’ve had my eye on a quiet corner of the desert for a while, and one day we had the opportunity to go wandering there. Traveling there involved the usual meandering up washes, taking detours for interesting rocks, and weaving through Joshua trees and around vegetation, all the while breathing in the arid, sharp desert air.
When we reached the general area I wanted to explore we fanned out and started poking around the rocks. I was examining a large swath of midden on the bank of a wide wash with growing excitement when my companion, who had disappeared into a tangle of boulders and brush, let out a shout. I stopped my investigation short and bounded over.
He had found a rather interesting site. The tall, upright boulder looked like it was the upper half of an oyster, presenting a pearl to world, but the reality was a bit more down to earth.
Under the overhang of a towering boulder another large boulder nestled but it was covered up top with what looked like packrat poop. The overhang had some pictographs but had also suffered a lot of exfoliation and most of the panel was destroyed. Once our eyes adjusted to the gloom we noticed some delicate pictographs behind the boulder, and we had to squeeze through a rather tight gap to get in and see them.
A very strange site! Let’s look.
The larger boulder lovingly protects a smaller boulder tucked in tightly below it. You can see some pictographs on the overhang – a nice squiggle line, and some additional elements behind the boulder.
Looking down and in towards the smaller boulder. The darker areas are nice little piles of … something icky. Packrat poop I think. The opening under the smaller boulder is less than a foot high.
There are some interesting-looking elements under the overhang but unfortunately I think the panel is incomplete thanks to a lot of exfoliation.
I think the solid red element that now looks like circles actually exfoliated ( notice the lighter areas ) and what we see now is only a small part of the original pictographs. To the right there are some indistinct lines that look like they may have been a zig-zag net type pictograph. Looking at those circles to the left, I wonder if they were a pair of anthropomorphs. There’s some lines below then that looks like they might be legs or arms.
That is a very tight squeeze! I peer over the boulder at the pictographs behind them. The wide angle lens flattened out the little poop towers I had to look over. The gap below the boulder visible in the previous picture was too small to squeeze through.
My companion investigates the crack on the far side of the boulder as a possible entry point while I gingerly stick a camera in over the boulder to try and photograph the pictographs you saw in the background in the previous picture. As I do this, he takes this picture through the narrow gap between the two boulders. That is my snub-nosed wide-angle lens, and I literally only have room for the camera in the gap – the whole camera is less than a foot deep from the hood to the back of the camera, and I’ve got very little room to spare between the rocks here, to give an idea of how cramped this is. The dark shape in the lower left of this picture is the boulder. Not going to get any pictures this way! I pulled the camera back carefully.
Since I had no luck trying to take pictures over the top of the small boulder, the only thing left to do is to try this little gap. It is about eight inches wide at the bottom and I’m rather more than eight inches wide in the bottom, so I devise a plan – I can kind of kneel down and go in feet first with my butt in the air so my body can fit through the wider part of the gap and my hands and feet can shuffle through the narrow part. This picture, taken from close to the ground. makes it look nice and roomy – it really wasn’t!
Oh yeah, we’re looking for pictographs, right? Here’s some DStretch to show of the delicate little elements we’re trying to see up close. The squiggle element on the low ceiling is also visible.
I wriggled into the gap and carefully turned around to sit down. Right by the entrance is a small overhang, just above the elements we saw in the background before. By holding the camera down by the ground and folding my legs out of the way, I take some pictures. Here is a nice one looking up into the alcove.
A closer look at just the elements in the alcove. The pigment is still nice and dark.
Looks like there’s also a faint circle here, and a faint line in the upper part of the alcove.
The elements just below. It kind of looks like partial handprints, doesn’t it? These elements are really, really small though – only a couple inches tall.
Here’s DStretch. You can see the faint circle above, and the lines below. Though they look like partial handprints at first glance I think they may be painted lines.
Those are not the only elements in these tight quarters. I can’t quite get my leg out of the way this time, but this fisheye wide angle gives an idea of where we’ll be looking next.
Yes, some more lines over to the right. These are the pictographs you saw in the pictures peering into this tiny space from over the smaller boulder.
These pictographs are also tiny, precisely drawn lines. I seldom see pictographs this delicate. Note the little crack running down the lower center of the picture – hopefully it doesn’t grow any more and this panel can hang on for a long time.
Some really delicate little lines, drawn in a purplish pigment. The 4-shaped figure is drawn in a brighter red.
Another look at those little lines. I took all these pictures blindly, holding the camera inches off the ground next to my butt while I squished my legs to one side. This shelter is so cramped! That, along with the tiny nature of the pictographs, make me wonder whether these were painted by children, or maybe adolescents.
The same picture with DStretch. Looks like those lines are more heavily pigmented at the bottom.
Finally, a picture taken with the camera held above my head while I sat down. This will give us a better look at the elements above that “4”.
They look pretty abstract to me.
After wriggling back out I remember I haven’t taken a good picture of the squiggle line yet, so I do.
Nice to stand upright again. I look back at the other, larger elements under the big overhang. Here’s a picture of both those elements and the squiggle line.
There’s nothing else hiding in the shelter, according to DStretch.
I have a lot of pictures like these of this site, where the pictographs are poorly framed because I just took shots blindly. I like this one though – the light shining in through the narrow gap between the overhang and the boulder really shows the rough texture of this overhang.
Well, that was it! Just an odd little shelter, with some pigment lines that didn’t form anything exciting. Any pigment on rock is exciting to me though – evidence that at one time people lived their lives here, painting pigment on rocks in ways that had meaning for them, caring for the land.
Very nice!
You really had to work for this one, but it was clearly worth the effort.
I used to take my granddaughter with a lot because she could fit into the small places that I couldn’t.
I have to admit to a bit of envy when I see posts from the JT area that are about sites I know nothing about. I know where a ton of them are, but clearly my work is not yet done.
Having said that, in photos 3 & 4 there is a darker picto on the left hand side that looks kind of like a bird. I don’t think it’s a bird, but it kind of looks like one. Anyway, I have photos of a symbol that looks very much like that one somewhere on my computer. I’ll try to find it and let you see it.
Boy, this one was a struggle! I need to get better at photos that show what I need to put up with, sometimes. Haha.
Very very interesting site, this one. Somebody really wanted those tiny little pictos painted in that gap. It is not easy to get in there. I wish the larger overhang wasn’t so exfoliated, I’m sure it was very interesting once upon a time.
I’m a bit claustrophobic but I will squeeze through gaps when I know there’s a reward ( not the least because it proves at least one person has successfully entered and exited before me! ). Fortunately I often travel with companions who are willing to go look in such places first.
I’d love to see pictures of anything similar to these! I find the way elements and themes repeat at some sites to be one of the most interesting parts of rock art.
I laugh at myself when I think that a few years back I honestly thought I had found everything there is to find in JT. Boy, was I wrong! I think I found at least two dozen more sites since I had those thoughts.
I feel the same way and I’ve been looking at rock art there since I was a little kid. Almost 60 years ago. That was back when it was no big deal to find arrowheads, and sometimes pottery. Because of, and thanks to my granny I never developed an interest in picking up stuff and putting it in my pocket. She convince me that I hated pot hunters and people who took things, and she also got me all geeked out on Rock Art. I’ve been that way ever since. I now know that many, if not most of the sites we saw had never been surveyed for the first time yet. Oh yeah, and there were a lot of desert tortoises around. So to make a long story short (I know, too late!), I’ve found a lot of those sites, but there are plenty more that I haven’t. While looking I found plenty of others that I knew nothing about. Sorry that this was so long. There is much more to the story that I left out to make this brief. Didn’t work very well, did it?
I was fortunate enough to grow up around people who taught me love and respect of nature and the works of others as a little kid. I kind of understand the Park Service picking up anything on the surface because otherwise people with sticky fingers would, but it is still sad to be at these places and see no artifacts left.
I love wandering JT – there are more boulders than a lifetime of wandering can discover, I think. Sometimes I find something new, tucked into a secret place, in territory I’ve been to dozens of times.