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!
This is one of the earliest pictograph sites I found, right at the beginning of my interest in hunting for these sites. Back then I carried a dinky compact camera in my pocket and very little knowledge of site photography in my head.
Despite their poor quality ( so poor that I’d never actually post them here! ) I enjoy looking at the photos I took of this site back then because they remind me vividly of what it felt like to discover this site for the first time – the excitement of peering up at it in the gathering dusk and realizing that the overhang contained paintings, the hurried scurrying about trying to find a route up, and finally peering into the shelter with a big smile before snapping a few hurried shots and hightailing it out of there before dark traps me in the backcountry. ( Back then I seemingly had a talent for discovering sites at the last possible moment, turning a sweaty day of frustration into a highlight at the last moment. )
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.
These petroglyphs are found along a sandstone cliff on the eastern side of Chalfant valley. Because sandstone is a relatively soft rock, most of the designs are deeply incised, often with V-shaped grooves, in contrast to the more shallowly ‘pecked’ petroglyphs one sees in harder rock such as volcanic basalt. Since most other petroglyph sites in the area are in volcanic basalt, this site is something of an outlier.
This site stretches about a quarter of a mile along a north-south wash. The sandstone bluff it is carved on sits on the western side of the wash. The designs are mostly high off the ground, suggesting that the bottom of the wash has been eroded down since the petroglyphs were carved.
The following series of photographs follows the wash south to north, taking in the various designs on the cliff faces.