Not all trips lead to impressive finds. Sometimes the only thing you find is solitude and the time to actually have thoughts and time to turn over all kinds of ideas and stories and memories in your mind, examining them from all angles and allowing them to run around freely in your head for a while and enrich you in some small way.
Here’s a little interlude of a small find in a full day.
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We’ve been taking some long walks on the Tablelands recently. In this case, the bright morning sun slipped in and out behind some thin clouds overhead. Each round in the shade provided some welcome relief. While the last vestiges of spring kept the Tablelands just cool enough for exploring summer was coming, and with it the exploration window for the lowlands was closing fast.
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We’re on our way to explore a really interesting part of the extensive site on the Volcanic Tablelands that’s been occupying our time of late. To date we’ve been exploring up and down ridges, and while today’s look is also at a ridge, there are several interesting features here. For one, we’ll see some grinding slicks in a very interesting configuration, a narrow passage full of petroglyphs, an awesome housing circle, some cupules with a secret, and, of course, petroglyphs!
Let’s go look!
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This entry is a continuation of the previous entry in the series, further examining a large petroglyph site on the Volcanic Tablelands.
In this entry, we will finish examining the top and westerly side of ridge we’ve been following. We’ll also peek over the ridge to get a glimpse of what awaits us in the next entry.
Remember that I pointed out some bird-print like petroglyphs previously? Well, this part of the site takes that quite a bit further. All along the top of the ridge we’ll find a progression of bird prints, usually in sets of two, all the way down to a large boulder with a whole jumble of bird print petroglyphs. Quite amazing.
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The Tübatulabal have lived in the Kern River Valley for time immemorial – they do not have a migration myth of any kind. Instead, their stories tell that they have always been here.
During the summer months they ranged into the foothills of the southern Sierra, gathering the pine nuts that gave them their tribal name – pine-nut eaters. During winter months, they retreated to their winter villages, semi-permanent settlements dotting the Kern River Valley, close by good water sources.
We went out to a very well-preserved Tübatulabal pictograph site during springtime. It is close to a couple of traditional village sites – maybe it was within the village, given the presence of several grinding slicks nearby.
Continue readingEarly one morning we were headed out along a well-travelled route that we’ve followed for the start of many adventures. This time, we noticed that we could clamber our way over into a small, semi-hidden little valley. When we did that, we found a cluster of boulders with a small habitation site tucked in among them.
Sometimes you come across a site that is almost stupefying in its sheer abundance – petroglyphs on every rock, for a quarter mile or more. These sites are thrilling to find, but they are difficult to document. I have a few like that sitting on the back burner, where every time I open the photo folder I think “I can’t really not show any of these 200 photos I picked from the 500 I took, they’re all good photos showing interesting elements … but who would want to sit through a blog post the length of a football field?”
In the first part of this entry, The Foyer, I described how we found this site, and what we saw in the first part of it.
After we had rested a bit and restored some food and water to our tired bodies I started documenting the second part of the site. My companion wandered outside to examine the little “patio” area outside the second entrance and look for any more pictographs close by.
I, on the other hand, found that the second panel was at such an angle, curving above my head and along the side of the tunnel, that I did my best work sprawled on my back on the dirt floor of the shelter, looking upward at the pictographs stretching above me.
We’ve been to some pretty amazing sites in Joshua Tree National Park, and it is hard to pick a favorite. Some are awe-inspiring because their pictographs are tucked away out of the reach of the elements and still as pristine as the day they were painted, however many years ago. Others have evocative imagery or a strong sense of place and of the people that made them. And others simply defy description: isolated, extensive, awe-inspiring.
We recently had the pleasure of visiting a small pictograph site a fair bit off the beaten track. This site is hidden in a boulder pile sitting above a small wash, and it also features a rock with some grinding slicks. I’ve heard that the slicks had a mano ( the smoothed stone used to grind material on the slick ) sitting nearby, but it was gone when I visited. Pity. It seems like these artifacts get restless when people visit these sites – please don’t help them wander away when you visit! Continue reading