The trailhead for Ryan Mountain is a popular spot in Joshua Tree National Park. Typically, many vehicles are parked in the lot and plenty of people are on the trail to the peak, hoping for fresh air, exercise and beautiful views.
If you keep right of the trailhead you’ll notice a small sign for the “Indian Cave”. This sign points you to a small habitation site with some weathered pictographs. It is a quick way to step back in time and think about what life in JTNP used to be like.
Most visitors bustle up the side of the mountain, ignoring the history of the area. If you take the time to go look, here is what you’ll see.
The rock shelter. There is a lot of soot deposited under the overhang and some of the flat stones on the ground have grinding slicks on them. There are also a few indistinct pictographs in the shelter.
Note the smooth area on the boulder in the foreground. That is a grinding slick where food were once prepared. In the background we can see the area where fire has discolored the rock surface. There are some obscured pictographs in the soot, as well as some somewhat better defined ones in one of the small depressions to the right of the soot streak.
One more food preparation surface.
This stone has a few small cupules ground into it. The finger of sunlight stabbing between two of these are reminiscent of the interaction at the Lone Woman of the Cave. Here it is probably just coincidental. Also, the stone is small enough to move around.
Right in the middle of this picture, between patches of soot-stained rock at the back of the shelter, is a faded swirl of pigment. Let’s see if DStretch can bring anything to light for us.
No … a good effort, but there is no discernible shape to this pigment. It is definitely applied pigment though, not part of the natural rock.
A short distance away is a second patch of pigment. This one looks more promising. Let’s see what it is.
That’s a nice little pictograph element.
Finally, this area higher up the rock also has a faint pictograph.
These pictographs are similar to the ones at the “Homestead” site – they don’t have the familiar shapes pictographs often take, such as rakes, circles, anthropomorphs and the like, and they are in a habitation shelter, rather than a ceremonial shelter. DStretch shows it has a companion too – this companion looks like one of the familiar bisected circles.
This site is well-worn – no evidence of lithic scatter remains, the overhang has evidence of modern campfires, and the pictographs are faded. Still, it is an interesting little area. The pictographs in this shelter reminds me of the ones at the “Homestead” site. I wonder if it was custom at some time to paint pictographs in occupation shelters – not for any ritual purpose or vision quest or anything like that, but simply because the shelter was a home. Maybe decoration, maybe to somehow bless the home, maybe to keep evil away. There is no support for these theories in the ethnographic record, as far as I know, so it is just uninformed speculation on my part!
Like I said, this little site is no secret, and it is also very well worn. Still, if you visit, do treat it with respect.