Petroglyphs are less often seen in Joshua Tree National Park than pictographs are but this doesn’t mean they are not there, or are rarer. They’re just harder to find, out in the quiet nooks and crannies of the Park.
The Volcanic Tablelands north of Bishop is one of those places you either know and love or have no idea exists.
For rock climbers and desert wanderers it is an exciting spot, offering many problems to work and remote places to explore, respectively.
For everyone else it is dreadfully dull, something to be zipped by ( going downhill ) or crept past ( going uphill ) as you navigate the steep Sherwin Grade on the nearby US 395.
Several of the sites I’ve written about ( and some of the ones I haven’t written about and hope to one day write about! ) are sites that I’ve been hunting for a while: through tedious and meticulous research I gradually build up an idea of where I should go look, and then I head out and look and look and look, and often come away with no more than a pile of “well, it is not here, here or here” to add to my data set!
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.
I am the kind of person who looks at a topo map and thinks “Oooh, look at this lonely spot way over here, far away from anything! I wonder what it’s like over here?” Oddly named meadows and creeks, hidden little valleys and lakes draw me in.
This is why I sometimes end up on some really silly hikes … way off in the sticks. Sometimes I find nothing but solitude and natural beauty, other times I find something interesting. This entry is the result of one such hike.
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.
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.
Oh, this site!
I heard a rumor of a possibility that maybe, perhaps, possibly … just a rumor, but perhaps! a certain little canyon had something up its sleeve. In my book that is more than enough reason to go out, so we bumped our way down an alarmingly rough two-track road one warm spring day.
This is one of the most extensive sites I’ve visited to date. I have been on the lookout for it for a while, managing to narrow down my search via scraps of information gathered here and there … and also, mainly, by the time-honored tradition of simply not finding it, over and over! ( Hey – knowing where it isn’t also counts as narrowing down the search, right? )
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.