This is a small petroglyph site in the Mojave desert: a couple dozen glyphs on an eroded lava flow above a wash. Unfortunately, vandals have found the site too and scratched some spindly marks around or over some of the petroglyphs.
This is one of the most awe-inspiring sites I’ve visited to date, because of the feeling of great age and meaning that surrounds this site – more so than most other sites I have been to. The volcanic tuff making up the boulders in this vicinity is relatively soft ( for rock! ) but also quite rough to the touch. Yet, at this site, a lot of the surface area is worn smooth and patinated. That is the kind of look only rock touched by human hands over a great period of time will acquire.
Some researchers speculated about the astronomical ties this site might have to the winter solstice, and estimated that the site may have first come into use at around 250 B.C. to 250 A.D. If true, that is an impressive age.
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.
Here is a rather nice part of the Counsel Rocks Archeological site. This is the hollow area underneath the boulder we looked at already in the “Approach” entry, the one with some rather inaccessible petroglyphs!
This is a smallish site on the Volcanic Tablelands. We first found this site late one freezing winter morning. We had started our day driving out from June Lake and south down the 395, and it was a harrowing experience. Overnight snow left 6-8 inches of powder on the 395, which wasn’t closed yet, and it was still coming down hard as we eased down Deadman’s Summit in 4WD. While trying to tell road from snowbank I hoped that the name of the summit wasn’t about to become prophetic!
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.
This is a nice little site tucked into a quiet corner with development all around. Unfortunately it hasn’t escaped unscathed, even though it is mostly intact.
Somewhere on the Volcanic Tablelands tumbled breccia cliffs lines both sides of a little canyon. On the north side of this canyon, a little above the canyon floor, there is a rock shelter that has been augmented with a low rock wall.
Here is a little cave that was an unexpected boon. Earlier in the afternoon we had finally hunted down a rather extensive petroglyph site and were walking back towards our vehicle during the golden hour, taking a straight cut across country instead of the circuitous route that helped us find our earlier quarry.