Over the summer we bid farewell to the low country for a day and went roaming around the toes of the Sierra, looking for traces of the past. The drive in was my favorite kind, changing from blacktop to graded dirt to bumpy two-track to a place to park.
This site is a pretty small one, consisting of a single panel on a modest boulder with two very shallow bedrock mortars close by. The pictographs are still very vivid even though the site is quite exposed to the elements. I’m wondering whether this site is fairly modern – or maybe the binding agent in the pigment is particularly robust. The pigment and pictographs themselves definitely appear authentic – no modern paint used here!
Parts of Joshua Tree National Park can be bewildering and dangerous if you’re not used to navigating overland, or not careful when you do wander.
For example, the Wonderland of Rocks has a reputation for being bewildering, and it can be if you are new to traveling overland, or have a bad sense of direction. Of course, it is potentially dangerous if you go alone, but the danger is not so much in getting lost as it is in slipping and falling while scrambling!
The Hospital Rock pictograph site in Sequoia National Park is openly advertised as a point of interest by the National Park Service, and thus is well worth visiting if you’re headed to the Park. The pictographs are enormous and striking.
This is a little site in Tübatulabal territory, on the bank of a seasonal creek. The site is a bit unusual in that the pictographs are not painted on granite. Instead, they are on the side of a slate outcropping on the creek’s eastern bank.
There are also some bedrock mortars down by the creek bed – beautiful conical mortars, worn about ten inches deep. One of the mortars is on a smallish boulder that has washed down the creek since it was originally made. We know this because the boulder is now wedged at an angle in the creek bed. There are also a couple of grinding slicks on a nearby boulder.
This pictograph site is on a ledge partway up a canyon wall. I’ve known about it for many years and visited it twice, but each time I came away with pictures that were less than satisfactory, so I haven’t written about it yet. This past winter I decided it was time to do something about that!
Sometimes, pictograph sites are vibrant and impressive. Other times, the remaining pigment needs careful attention and some deliberate work with DStretch before you can see what used to be. Today’s site falls in that category.
This is a rather nice little panel of pictographs, facing east from its perch on the western side of a low saddle.
The panel is not complete – in several places small flakes of the rock face have exfoliated away, taking the pigment with it. This effect is not very noticeable at first because the style of the panel is unusual, with lots of small, choppy elements interspersed with some well-made Representational elements. At first glance it just seems like the missing parts were intentional. But when you examine the rock face a little more you can tell by the color differences that the panel is exfoliating.
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!