Not long ago we came across a most unusual site – pictographs in an old mining adit.
“Be Hip or Be Square” Pictographs
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Category Archives: Great Basin
“Midgewater Madness” Pictographs and Petroglyphs
This is a pretty nice site of pictographs and petroglyphs but my main memory of the visit is of being miserably itchy, since we were plagued by hordes of no-see-ums! They had a great time finding spots to land and had a feast wherever they ended up. With long sleeves and a bug net the visit would have been better, but we did not expect to be swarmed and were not prepared at all!
“Desolation of Disappointment” Petroglyphs
Early Autumn can be pretty toasty in California’s desert regions, and last September saw us head out to a petroglyph site while wishing the weather was maybe 15 to 20 degrees cooler. On top of that, we weren’t sure if what we would find would be worth it! We’d read some site descriptions from other visitors, and while those descriptions stressed the sheer quantity of petroglyphs, they also mentioned disquieting phrases like “poorly pecked” and “indistinct”. Still, we wouldn’t know what was there until we went to look, would we?
“Rattle River” Petroglyphs
This entry isn’t named for anything specific to the petroglyphs. Instead it is named after what the trip to see it was like! This is one of the last sites we visited using our little red truck, and no other site came closer to breaking the truck than this one did.
The funny thing is that there are two ways to get to it: the way we approached ( scenic but brutal for a tiny stock truck: down a rocky canyon with a river we had to ford multiple times ) or the way we left ( nice flat graded dirt road! ) Never have I been more thankful to get back to the pavement in one piece – not even that one time we — cough — walked for miles, didn’t find anything and ended up getting stuck in deep sand for an hour ( and we had to dig out with a flat rock because we didn’t expect to get stuck and didn’t have a shovel. )
“Crown of Stone” Petroglyphs
The Owens Valley is dotted with volcanic outcroppings. These rocks, reasonably soft to carve and typically darkly varnished, proved to be an excellent canvases for petroglyphs. There are many beautiful petroglyph sites scattered throughout the valley.
“Menacing Mantis” Petroglyphs
Oh, this site!
I heard a rumor of a possibility that maybe, perhaps, possibly … just a rumor, but perhaps! a certain little canyon had something up its sleeve. In my book that is more than enough reason to go out, so we bumped our way down an alarmingly rough two-track road one warm spring day.
“Atomic Man” Pictographs
This pictograph site consists of an elaborate, if faded, main panel, and a secondary panel containing some pictographs and petroglyphs.
I have my doubts about the authenticity of parts of this site, both because of its location in a region famous for filming Westerns, and because the subject matter of the more elaborate panel reads like a Western retelling or interpretation of what pictographs may have been like — an interpretive depiction of a mysterious tale, told in symbolism.
That said, this is only my opinion, and some features of the site I will discuss in this entry argue against this interpretation.
Ayers Rock Pictographs
The Ayers Rock pictographs, or Bob Rabbit pictographs, as they are also known after the Kawaiisu shaman purported to have created them, consists of three panels painted on different sides of an enormous monolith at the southern foot of a boulder-strewn hill.
The pictograph boulder, seen from the north. There is a single pictograph in the alcove on the right, and a panel in the center recess.
Bob Rabbit was well-known as a “weather shaman”, or ̉uupuhagadi – which may be more accurately translated as “weather manipulator”.