Joshua Tree National Park is one of my favorite places. By now many of its nooks and crannies are comforting and familiar to me. The towering piles of stone, the clean yet erratic lines of the Joshua trees, the sparse foliage of the creosote, the arid smell of juniper and the slick limbs of manzanita … all of these hold a dear place in my heart. The desert is sharp and clean in scent and look. It draws me in. I even spare a kindly thought towards the yucca, as long as its mighty, menacing, pointy leaves don’t skewer me. I have “kabob candidate” stamped on my forehead as far as yuccas are concerned.

The pictograph boulder that forms the focus of this post. There is a black element close to the viewer on left, and also red handprints and other elements towards the right.

While I have my own appreciation of the desert, people have been appreciating, depending on, and living in the desert long before I ever came along.

One such tribe of people, the Serrano, settled in and around what is now the northern part of Joshua Tree National Park. They stepped lightly on the land, living in small villages and foraging for food.

Here and there a rock shelter bears witness to their past with soot deposits on the ceiling or perhaps a metate or a single mortar in the bedrock.

A square on view of the site. A big slab of granite dropped neatly away from the boulder and now lies on the ground in front of the shelter. The overhang created was perfect for the pictographs.

Keen-eyed wanderers notice pottery sherds in secluded spots — they now remain only in secluded spots, since most of what can be easily found has been plundered  — or they happen upon the many pictographs left behind on the granite monoliths of the Park.

One such site sits in a peaceful wash – literally in the wash, which is somewhat unusual. The pictograph panel faces upstream so the inattentive visitor may easily tramp past it without ever noticing it.

Even coming back down the wash you are probably keeping an eye out for branches as you push your way past a manzanita, so you may miss it again.

The most striking feature of this site is the presence of handprints, which has given this site another nickname: “Bloody Hands” pictographs. Handprint sites are scattered throughout the Western United States but they are not common.

A close look at the handprint panel. There are some drawn designs lower in the panel.

DStretch makes the chain element at the lower center of the panel clearer. These chain motifs often were associated with puberty rituals.

While we don’t know much about the history of this site it is apparent that the pigment was applied by actual hands pressed into pigment and then onto the rock, with additional pigment painted below.

There is also a solitary black pictograph off to the side.

A close view of the black element. There is also a dab of red to the right of it. This element is very similar to elements found at Alister’s Cave.

Some visitors speculate that this site may have been part of a female puberty ritual – in some tribes the initiates raced each other to a rock at the end of the ritual and received pigment from relatives in order to paint a design on the rock.

Mixing in some DStretch shows the black element very clearly. There is a dab of red pigment to the right of it and a few more traces above it. The fractal nature of it is reminiscent of Joshua trees.

This may have been the case at this site too, though it is worth noting that while red was the female color in these rituals and black was the male color, red was sometimes used in the male ritual as well. So maybe these handprints on stone were laid down by young men.

This site is still in good condition. There is a good overhang protecting it from the elements.

If you happen to visit it – and you may well do so since it is becoming better known over time – make sure to leave it just as you found it. Don’t touch the pictographs. They are fragile. Even just fitting your hand over one of the elements could leave behind residue – skin oils, sweat, remnants from your snack – that seep into and damage the pigment. Resist the urge and enjoy the site without touching. There is deep satisfaction in treading lightly on the world, after all.