I made my first acquaintance with “The Lone Woman of the Cave” a few years ago as I hurried out of the backcountry with the sun setting behind the hills. Though it was a pleasant enough evening there was a fall chill in the air and a day of exploring made my limbs heavy. It was a good time to be leaving the desert for the comforts of civilization.
Joshua Tree National Park is one of my favorite places. By now many of its nooks and crannies are comforting and familiar to me. The towering piles of stone, the clean yet erratic lines of the Joshua trees, the sparse foliage of the creosote, the arid smell of juniper and the slick limbs of manzanita … all of these hold a dear place in my heart. The desert is sharp and clean in scent and look. It draws me in. I even spare a kindly thought towards the yucca, as long as its mighty, menacing, pointy leaves don’t skewer me. I have “kabob candidate” stamped on my forehead as far as yuccas are concerned.
The area these pictographs are found in is peppered with pictograph sites – some elaborate, others just a few dabs of pigment in a secret spot.
The Serrano have lived in this area for so long that their creation myth ties them to the nearby oasis of Maara’ ( in present-day Twentynine Palms, close to the Joshua Tree National Park headquarters ) as opposed to other creation myths that are often more general, or intertwined with a migration story.
Joshua Tree National Park is well-known for its rock formations and the climbing opportunities they offer. Some of the same fantastic formations that attract modern rock climbers also held meaning for Native Americans, and this conflict is clearly seen in places where rock climbers have damaged or destroyed pictographs.
Alister’s Cave is one area where climbing interests and cultural artifacts collide. Even though it is signposted by the National Park service, warning that it is closed to climbing due to the Federally protected pictographs, there is still evidence on the internet of climbers who disregard these signs, and the formation bears the talc patches from climber visits.
These pictographs are a collection of fairly simple elements, found within maybe a half-mile or so of each other. There are larger, better defined habitation sites in the vicinity, some of which I have written about.
I collected these together in this entry since they share the common trait of being painted in the eroded hollows of large boulders.