Several years ago, we travelled through Western Mono territory and visited a few pictograph sites. I had somehow not gotten around to writing about this site until now.
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“The Cure” Pictographs
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Tag Archives: Western Mono pictographs
Hospital Rock Pictographs
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.
Potwisha Pictographs
The Western Mono are an offshoot tribe from the Paiute, who travelled across the Sierra crest about 600 years ago to trade the desert on the eastern side of the mountain range for the acorns and pine nuts on the western slopes. They occupied a narrow range of land at higher elevation on the west side of the central Sierra and established villages all along the Kaweah River.
One of these villages, at about 2,000 feet elevation, was on our itinerary for the day. The remnants of the village, a rock shelter with pictographs and a lot of bedrock mortars, are right on the banks of the Kaweah River.
“Bee’s Knees” Pictographs
This site is nestled at higher elevation on the slopes of the western Sierra, around 6,500 feet or so. There’s no habitation sites nearby that I’m aware of, and nothing stands out about the landscape. However, the site seems deliberately chosen all the same – this is a rocky little knoll and the boulder it is painted on is the largest in the grouping.
To me the site seems to represent a shaman’s portal into the spirit world: it is painted in a crack in a large, striking boulder. This would have been considered a good spot from which to access the spirit world.