This pictograph site, in Kawaiisu territory, is one I’ve had my eye on for a while. Finally, we had a good opportunity to stop by, so we examined maps, punched some coordinates into the GPS, and set off.
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!
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.
We went hiking in the foothills of the Sierra on an absolutely perfect day – blue skies, fluffy clouds, a light breeze, an ambient temperature that was neither hot nor cold. Some distance from the trailhead, where the trail had petered out and we were going cross country, hopping or wading through the creek we were following, we came across something very unusual – a tubular cave in a small granite outcropping.
We do not pass such things by, so we climbed up and had a look. And we found pictographs, painted around the cave entrance and on the ceiling!
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 that we visited with Guy Starbuck. Thank you, Guy! This was a lot of fun.
Out in the open Mohave desert there is an outcropping of varnished desert stone, perched on the edge of a valley. The area around this outcropping has many more small boulders scattered on the soft ground. On some of these, as well as on some of the boulders forming the outcropping, are Abstract petroglyphs. Some of the designs are carved, others are pecked. Almost all are darkly revarnished and are often difficult to see.
This site is nestled at higher elevation on the slopes of the western Sierra, around 6,500 feet or so. There’s no habitation sites nearby that I’m aware of, and nothing stands out about the landscape. However, the site seems deliberately chosen all the same – this is a rocky little knoll and the boulder it is painted on is the largest in the grouping.
To me the site seems to represent a shaman’s portal into the spirit world: it is painted in a crack in a large, striking boulder. This would have been considered a good spot from which to access the spirit world.
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.
This site is a companion site to the “Be Hip or be Square” pictograph site. They are both in the same mountain range and both painted on a side wall of a mining adit that petered out.
This similarity makes me think that they are contemporary, but this site is more rudimentary than its companion, and the design of the pictographs at the two sites doesn’t really have much in common.
Still, this is another site that we know can at most be as old as the adit, and the adit won’t be older than 1860, a few years before the first forays into mining in this area. Continue reading