Tag Archives: grinding slicks

“Chain Reaction” Pictographs

2 Replies

During a busy winter season we managed to slip away to the backcountry one weekend day. On my wish list were three sites – two I’ve never been to and one I had been to but haven’t documented very well during prior visits.

As sometimes happens, the sequence of events for the day ended up putting us in an interesting spot … but I won’t talk too much about that here. This site was the 2nd of the three sites we were trying to visit, and the time we spent at it, as well as the time we spent hunting fruitlessly for the first site, put us at the third site at just the wrong time, where we ended up getting snowed out of the backcountry!

Continue reading →

“Indian Slate” Pictographs

2 Replies

This is a little site in Tübatulabal territory, on the bank of a seasonal creek. The site is a bit unusual in that the pictographs are not painted on granite. Instead, they are on the side of a slate outcropping on the creek’s eastern bank.

There are also some bedrock mortars down by the creek bed – beautiful conical mortars, worn about ten inches deep. One of the mortars is on a smallish boulder that has washed down the creek since it was originally made. We know this because the boulder is now wedged at an angle in the creek bed. There are also a couple of grinding slicks on a nearby boulder.

Continue reading →

“Sun Spangled Surface” Pictographs

2 Replies

We were poking around in the Eastern Sierra foothills one spring day, looking for pictographs, and found a nice little site tucked away in a wide canyon.

First we found some big slabs of granite poking out of the dirt downslope with plenty of bedrock mortars on the exposed surfaces. Then, when we turned around to look at the slope above us, a prominent rock formation caught our eye.

We thought to ourselves: well, maybe we are not the first people attracted to it … so we climbed up to it to took a look, and we found a small pictograph site!

Continue reading →

Queen Mountain Pictograph Boulder

Leave a reply

Now here’s a site that was hard to find! I’m not even sure how many trips we made before we found it.

This site is kind of in the middle of nowhere so you have to commit a good chunk of time just to hoof it to the general area, never mind start searching. After we had a couple of unsuccessful attempts at finding it I started analyzing my very vague research more thoroughly.  As I found more clues I steadily narrowed down its location until finally I was sure I had it this time!  So we set out again to find it. This was going to be the time. It was late afternoon and we were kind of done for the day already but I had the urge to be out in the desert despite my leaden legs, so off we went.

Continue reading →

“Rattle River” Petroglyphs

Leave a reply

This entry isn’t named for anything specific to the petroglyphs. Instead it is named after what the trip to see it was like! This is one of the last sites we visited using our little red truck, and no other site came closer to breaking the truck than this one did.

The funny thing is that there are two ways to get to it: the way we approached ( scenic but brutal for a tiny stock truck: down a rocky canyon with a river we had to ford multiple times ) or the way we left ( nice flat graded dirt road! ) Never have I been more thankful to get back to the pavement in one piece – not even that one time we — cough — walked for miles, didn’t find anything and ended up getting stuck in deep sand for an hour ( and we had to dig out with a flat rock because we didn’t expect to get stuck and didn’t have a shovel. )

Continue reading →

Ryan Mountain Trailhead Pictographs

Leave a reply

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.

Continue reading →

“Shelf Life” Pictographs

Leave a reply

This is one of the earliest pictograph sites I found, right at the beginning of my interest in hunting for these sites. Back then I carried a dinky compact camera in my pocket and very little knowledge of site photography in my head.

Despite their poor quality ( so poor that I’d never actually post them here! ) I enjoy looking at the photos I took of this site back then because they remind me vividly of what it felt like to discover this site for the first time – the excitement of peering up at it in the gathering dusk and realizing that the overhang contained paintings, the hurried scurrying about trying to find a route up, and finally peering into the shelter with a big smile before snapping a few hurried shots and hightailing it out of there before dark traps me in the backcountry. ( Back then I seemingly had a talent for discovering sites at the last possible moment, turning a sweaty day of frustration into a highlight at the last moment. )

Continue reading →

“What Lies Beneath” Pictographs

Leave a reply

The meaning of Native American rock art is poorly understood. The ethnographic record, combined with thoughtful research, have suggested meanings to us – some still considered current, others fallen out of favor: boundary markers, hunting magic, shamanistic recordings of vision quests, markings for shaman’s caches … there is a long list of possible interpretations.

Part of the debate is whether pictograph and petroglyph sites were held sacred, created in hidden corners of the world, or whether they shared living space with the people who created them.

Continue reading →

“Cornerstone” Pictographs

Leave a reply

This little site gave me a surprisingly hard time!

For starters, the first time I was in the area I missed discovering it by about 150 yards. During that visit I was hunting for a somewhat well-known pictograph site that is very close to this one, forming part of the same habitation complex. I was hunting all along a drainage for that site, and had forged about as far as I could go when finally, there it was! By the time the photography for that site was done it was high time for lunch and my companion was in no mood for more rocks so we headed back and had a great lunch at the local microbrewery, instead of exploring the area more.

Continue reading →

“Bad Moons Rising” Petroglyphs

2 Replies

Early one morning I was out hunting specifically for this site. I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be too hard to actually see if I could just find myself in the general vicinity of it, since the photographs I’d seen made it appear large enough to be visible from some distance away.

Continue reading →