Smoke Tree Wash winds its way through Joshua Tree National Park’s southern portion, and if most Park visitors notice it, it is usually when they start wondering who named all these washes ( “Smoke Tree”? “Porcupine”? “Fried Liver“?? ) that the Park’s main road crosses.
If you’re up for a walk you might find some petroglyphs out in the flats, so that’s just what we set off to do one winter morning. We had our choice of walking along in the bed of the wash or kicking out and walking along some ridges, which is what we did. Our hard work mostly didn’t pay off ( so many rocks out there! So many! ) but we did find traces of an old trail – maybe an old Indian trail? Maybe a mining trail? No mining activity in the area that I know of though.
Finally, as the day wore on and our energy lagged, we rounded a boulder and found what we were looking for. These petroglyphs are painstakingly scratched into the side of a hard granite boulder. With little desert varnish on the boulder they are hard to see. We visited at a time of day where some were cast into relief, making them a little easier to spot.
Let’s look!
An old trail winds uphill. I don’t know if this was an Indian trail or a mining trail. No mining activity in the vicinity, though.
Looking downhill. Only this section of the trail survived: it peters out on a low saddle at the top, and ends in a wash going the other way.
Finally, after looking at so, so many boulders and finding nothing, we locate some faint scratched petroglyphs.
A bit further on, I spot something high up a jumble of boulders and start climbing.
The result is amazing. If I had just taken a photo from below with a zoom lens instead of climbing up, I would have thought I found a petroglyph. This, amazingly enough, is not a petroglyph but a natural weathering pattern. The light lines have formed around cracks in the rock where rain water had leeched out minerals.
Finally, we find a real petroglyph that is more than just faint scratches.
It is a little Linear design, with a tiny circle inside one of the lines. That design – small circles with lines – is very common in this area.
There is even a small bedrock mortar, and we also find a few sherds further on.
Best of all, we run across the main petroglyph panel. This unvarnished boulder sits out in the open and has several deep petroglyphs incised on it. Some of the lower ones are covered with lichen.
The most prominent elements are at the bottom of the boulder. We have the nested V-shaped elements, and to their right two nearly identical anthropomorphic figures. The remainder of the boulder is covered with various other faint designs.
Behind and to the left of the first panel is this rock outcropping that hosts two more panels.
The design in the lower right looks a lot like the comet from the Comet Cave pictograph site, or perhaps some of the designs up at the Red Rock Canyon petroglyph site. Again, the whole boulder is covered with hard to see designs.
There is a single small mortar tucked into the tiny overhang between the boulders.
The best preserved, easiest to see element is just above this mortar. It looks a little like an abstract antelope head with horns.
There are several other elements on this panel as well. Generally, this is the easiest panel to observe and photograph. It has the most varnish so the elements stand out more.
We take a long detour looking for more sites, but come up empty. I do find this bird’s nest on a ledge at the top of a medium-sized boulder.
While not as spectacular as some of the sites we’ve visited, this site was still interesting to see, and we got to spend several hours in the desert on a long walk. On the way back I collected a baker’s dozen of mylar balloons tangled in the vegetation. Those things are all over the place in the backcountry – pollution blowing in from afar.
Have you been to the petroglyph panel that has seven concentric circles? It is located in the south area of Joshua Tree National Park.
I have not, but I do have some trips to the southern part of the Park planned for this year, if everything lines up! I’ve been neglecting that part for too long and there are several spots I’m very interested in.