After a few miles of wandering, poking around rock piles, and ducking in under various boulder overhangs or into various nooks and crannies, we happened upon a small pictograph and petroglyph site. Since we looked all over the surrounding area I’m fairly sure that there’s no other sites really close to this one, and there was no signs of a habitation site either.
It is not very often that you come across a headless digitate anthropomorph in the backcountry … well, come to think of it, maybe it’s not that unlikely if you do the kind of thing I do!
So … should you be in a situation where this might happen to you, make sure to have your camera on hand so you can take its picture.
The Pinto Wye Arrastra in Joshua Tree National Park is one of the many well-preserved artifacts of Western mining and ranching in the Park that can still be seen today.
An arrastra is a type of mill that was used to pulverize ore. Most of the ones I’ve seen follow a simple design: a circular pit lined with flat stones, and a shaft with connected drag stones on a pivot above the pit. The shaft is then spun in some way to pull the drag stones around in the pit and process the ore. Sometimes burros or human power was used, and in later times gasoline engines.
In Part 1 I posted about the pictographs that can be found at the “Diamond Solstice” site in Joshua Tree National Park. In this post, I will examine the theory of this site as a solstice observation site a little more.
This is a beautiful little site in Joshua Tree National Park that I first visited years ago. I’ve left off writing about it because I kept meaning to find out more about the rumors that this site has a “ray of light” pointing towards one of the elements on the summer solstice.
Well, I have some information about that for you too! Here, I will spend a post just looking at this site. While going back over my photos of the site, taken on multiple previous visits, I was struck by how pretty the site really is.
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.
We found this site a couple of years ago on one of our looooonnnggg jaunts in the backcountry of Joshua Tree National Park. There we were, slouching through the desert, with many pounds of camera equipment and water on our backs, since we were there to revisit our “Lonely Ledge“, “Lonely Hollow” and “Lonely Falls” discoveries and thus we were humping my full arsenal of camera equipment through the desert.
This was after we had photographed, and in one case discovered, the three sites listed above. It was late afternoon, some miles of undulating, rocky, brushy terrain laid between us and our vehicle, and the afternoon was hot. I had packed a sleeveless shirt but no sunscreen, so I was definitely a bit baked when we stumbled across this site on our way back.
We visited this site with Guy Starbuck. Be sure to check out his writeup of it!
This site is really strange: out in the middle of nowhere, not close to any other sites or habitation sites. We looked all over in the area surrounding this site, excited, sure there would be more to see, but – no! We found a whole lot of nothing. Heh heh, sometimes that’s how it goes.
This site is probably Serrano, but it is hard to say. The tribal boundaries are not that clearly defined around JTNP. The complete lack of other artifacts like arrow points or pottery sherds makes it even harder to place. Some of the elements, like the crosses, also occur at some other isolated sites in the region, and sometimes at petroglyph sites too.
This is a site in Joshua Tree National Park that, as far as I know, have never been surveyed or documented. We were out in the backcountry with our friend Guy Starbuck, enjoying the back country of JTNP, when we noticed something we thought we’d better investigate. Check out his post about this site here.
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.