This is a medium-sized site in the Owens Valley — which is known more for its sprawling petroglyph sites — but nonetheless features some interesting pictograph sites that often mirror imagery found across the eastern Sierra.
The boulder itself would certainly feel right at home anywhere in the Sierra, being the typical granite boulder found in the region.
Let’s see what we found!
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Today’s find is something a bit different from what we’ve had recently: a pictograph site in the Owens Valley!
Continue readingThe petroglyphs at this site are pretty new-looking – there is not much varnishing at all – but they are very spectacular and they appear authentic. We stopped by this out of the way site one bright morning, and really enjoyed our visit. The petroglyphs are extensive and unique.
Let’s look!
Sometimes you can have a good day by simply pointing the nose of your vehicle off the beaten track.
One spring morning, we were doing just that, leaving one of Nevada’s straight, lonely paved roads and nosing down a dirt track, in search of what lies over the ridge. Think about it: you have a lonely paved road, sparsely travelled … and only a tiny fraction of this road’s sparse travelers ever turn to go beyond the scrubby ridges that make up their horizon as the road they follow winds from basin to ridge to flat to ridge and back down to basin again.
But we wanted to see what the world looked like, and so we followed the dirt road.
Today’s post is about a little site that we visited last fall. We struck out north of our usual stomping grounds, ending up in the southwestern counties of Nevada. There is a lot of pre-history here.
In a lonely, wind-swept saddle between two low hills there is a hot spring, with a cold spring higher up the slope. The ground is speckled with lithic scatter, indicating some prehistoric presence here. There are no suitable rock shelters nearby, so any Native American camps would have been open air camps. Continue reading
We were driving along a dirt road somewhere in the windswept heart of Nevada when I thought that a certain random clump of darkly varnished boulders looked promising, so I convinced my companion to pull over so we could have a look. We donned boots and hoisted cameras. It seemed like we were both down to a single pair of socks that weren’t studded with grass seeds, so this better pan out or we’d waste a good pair of socks on nothing!
I forded through the spiky grass and examined the first boulders. Well shoot. Nothing! Still, that barely means anything. As far as the eye could see, there were boulders lurking in the sea of golden grass, waiting to be examined. In this landscape you’d run out of patience, and the will to live, long before you ran out of boulders.
Fish Cave can be found on the shoreline of ancient lake Lahontan. It was named for the fish fossils found nearby during the the earliest archeological investigations.
Burnt Cave, on the shore of ancient Lake Lahontan in southern Nevada, was churned out of the hillside by the lakeshore waves around 7,000 years ago. There are several other caves in this ancient north-facing bay, but Burnt Cave is the only one with visible pictographs. It is an easy stroll from a dirt parking lot to the cave, which is a pity because some fool with a can of spray paint had happened by at some point. Some people are why other people can’t have nice things, I guess.
This was a fun little site to visit! Though smaller than many other petroglyph sites, it has some very fascinating elements.
Most of the petroglyphs at this site are similar in style to others in the vicinity, but the showcase element – the eponymous lizard – is unique. It looks much more like elements found way southwest of here, in Chumash rock art, or in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Yokuts or Tübatulabal territory.
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