Not all trips lead to impressive finds. Sometimes the only thing you find is solitude and the time to actually have thoughts and time to turn over all kinds of ideas and stories and memories in your mind, examining them from all angles and allowing them to run around freely in your head for a while and enrich you in some small way.
Here’s a little interlude of a small find in a full day.
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We’ve been taking some long walks on the Tablelands recently. In this case, the bright morning sun slipped in and out behind some thin clouds overhead. Each round in the shade provided some welcome relief. While the last vestiges of spring kept the Tablelands just cool enough for exploring summer was coming, and with it the exploration window for the lowlands was closing fast.
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While on a ramble in an area where we’ve made some nice finds in the past, we happened across this little site.
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We’re finishing up our exploration with some rather nifty petroglyphs.
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Well, I’m back.
We’re in the home stretch now, finishing up our exploration of a large site on the Volcanic Tablelands. In this entry we’ll focus on an enormous panel, stretching across several separate boulders, and additional panels that seem like a continuation of the main panel.
This is the part of this site you’ll see most often in photographs – the largest panels, the most spectacular petroglyphs. While I love seeing these, the smaller elements often hold my interest – why here, on this rock face? Why this particular element? Who made it? How long ago? Questions we will never know the answers to.
Now, let’s have a look!
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We’re on our way to explore a really interesting part of the extensive site on the Volcanic Tablelands that’s been occupying our time of late. To date we’ve been exploring up and down ridges, and while today’s look is also at a ridge, there are several interesting features here. For one, we’ll see some grinding slicks in a very interesting configuration, a narrow passage full of petroglyphs, an awesome housing circle, some cupules with a secret, and, of course, petroglyphs!
Let’s go look!
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Today we’re continuing our exploration of an expansive petroglyph site on the Volcanic Tablelands. We’ve explored the westerly part of the site in detail, seeing petroglyphs, cupules and housing circles. Today we’re on our way to look at the north-easterly part of the site, where we’ll find several things that tie the outcropping we’ll be exploring in to the rest of the site. Prepare for more petroglyphs, housing circles, and bird print petroglyphs!
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We’re continuing our exploration of a wonderful habitation & petroglyph site in this entry.
In the previous entry we finished walking a ridge of volcanic tuft from north to south, noting the numerous bird print petroglyphs atop the ridge. In this entry, we’ll walk back up the ridge on its easterly side. There are numerous housing circles on this side, as well as petroglyphs, and the ground is littered with lithic scatter.
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This entry is a continuation of the previous entry in the series, further examining a large petroglyph site on the Volcanic Tablelands.
In this entry, we will finish examining the top and westerly side of ridge we’ve been following. We’ll also peek over the ridge to get a glimpse of what awaits us in the next entry.
Remember that I pointed out some bird-print like petroglyphs previously? Well, this part of the site takes that quite a bit further. All along the top of the ridge we’ll find a progression of bird prints, usually in sets of two, all the way down to a large boulder with a whole jumble of bird print petroglyphs. Quite amazing.
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We made a couple of visits to this sprawling petroglyph site in the Owens Valley over the last three years. The first time we visited was late on an early summer day, and the desert varnish was awfully reflective so a lot of photos did not turn out. The second time was mid-morning on a late fall day, so at least the shadows and lighting were very different!
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