I don’t usually write twice about sites when I revisit them, but this site is so unusual that I thought another entry would be worthwhile here, especially since we found a few additional pictographs on this visit.

This was one of the first sites I ever found, and one of the first sites I ever wrote about.

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Now here’s a site that I’ve spent some time hunting for! Even though I first found it years ago, I’m only now getting around to writing about it, after we’ve been back to take some more pictures of it. It is in an area of Joshua Tree National Park I’ve visited often, but it isn’t really obvious. You kind of have to know that it is there.

My only clue to find it was that it was in a hollow rock, so I spent an insane amount of time eyeing the huge granite boulders, wondering whether they were solid or not, and walking around them looking for a way in. How often do you see someone march up to a boulder with a speculative glint in their eye before they start circling it and bending down looking for hidden entrances? Looks like they got a touch to much desert sun to the head when they start doing that, I’ll tell you!

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This was one of the most rewarding site hunts I’ve ever had. Over a couple of years I pieced together a variety of small clues, finally discovering one key piece of information that revealed the location. This is one of my favorite things about visiting these sites – the search itself! Just grabbing some coordinates and barreling straight for a site is not as satisfying as doing the legwork towards discovery for myself, and experiencing that moment when all the clues come together to reveal the location.

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We visited this site with a fellow desert explorer, Guy Starbuck of starbuck.org.

This little site is hidden deep in the backcountry of Joshua Tree National Park. It look a long slog through vale and gully just to get here, climbing up and around many obstacles, wriggling through manzanita and choosing to bypass this yucca here in favor of that cactus over there, simply because the gap between thorn and boulder seems a little wider over there than down here and besides, have you seen what a yucca leaf can do when you meet it at the wrong angle? Always choose the cactus over the yucca.

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This pictograph shelter forms part of a much larger habitation complex.

The pictographs themselves are not particularly special – in fact, some are fairly rudimentary – but the whole area is of archaeological interest because of midden fields and other evidence that this was an extensively used habitation site at one time. Across a small open space from this overhang there is another, much larger shelter, and while there are no pictographs in that second shelter the soot deposits on the ceiling shows that it was inhabited too.

The pottery sherds that archaeologists recovered at this site point to Serrano or Cahuilla occupation, dating from around a thousand or so years ago to historic times. The site also yielded lithic scatter and midden deposits, the later radiating away from the rock shelter.

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