During the late winter we had the opportunity to return to the “Curious Crack” site. On the first trip we found petroglyphs but this time we peered closely at the nearby cliffs because there are apparently some pictographs in the area that we missed during our first visit.
We soon found some pictographs on what in retrospect was an obvious rock face to examine. They were really faded but visible if you looked closely.
The lower half of this rock face has several very faded pictographs on it. Most prominent is the remnants of a Rectilinear pictograph, just to the right of dead center. Parts of the rock face have eroded away, possibly erasing some pictographs.
A close look at an obvious patch of pigment on the right hand side of the cliff. Note the many chip marks caused by bullets.
The patch with DStretch – a very bright red. Because it is so indistinct I would have thought this patch was natural if it didn’t pop this much with DStretch.
This first rock face faces generally east and is therefore exposed to the morning in addition to wind and rain, so it is no surprise that the pictographs have faded so much.
This is the most visible and obvious element on this rock face. With the naked eye a Rectilinear design is clearly visible, and there are some fainter designs to the left of too.
The faint designs were difficult to tease out of the reddish rock face. There appears to be a small grid at the bottom, and some indistinct elements at the top.
All of the visible pictographs on this panel are Rectilinear in form, as far as I can tell. They are sparsely and arbitrarily scattered on the large cliff. In that respect they are similar to one of the petroglyph panels at the site where the elements are bunched together on a rock face that had room for many more. In that case I thought maybe it was the difficulty of reaching the rock face that caused the artist to be physically restricted to a certain spot. In this case you can walk right up to the panel so I’m not sure why the elements are positioned in this way.
One interesting thing about this panel is that some of the elements are very close to the ground, including one line that is partly buried. Could it be that sand piled up in front of the cliff over the years and this panel used to be higher up? Is there more buried below? I don’t know, and it is very illegal to excavate archeological sites if you are not an authorized archeologist, so I will have to keep wondering!
One more Rectilinear design, very close to ground level.
DStretch does some good work on this faded Rectilinear element.
I find it interesting when pictographs and petroglyphs are at the same site, since I haven’t found them together very often. In this region there are several sites where petroglyphs have been carefully painted with red pigment ( “Fall Funnel“, “Bad Moons Rising“, “Cupule City” and “Circle Obelisk” come to mind ) but that is not the same as pictographs painted in their own right. Sites with both seem to be rare.
We were on the hunt for pictographs but it turned out we hadn’t found all the petroglyphs at the site on the first visit either!
After this find we started scouting southerly along the cliff. There were many likely-looking cliffs and boulders around – and where there is some pictographs there might be more!
It seems that this site was important, given the proliferation of petroglyphs. Apart from a possible housing circle by one of the cliffs ( as discussed in the companion post, “Curious Crack” Petroglyphs ) there aren’t really signs of habitation remaining – no metates, no grinding slicks, no midden.
That means this site could have been mostly ritualistic – and a curious one at that, because some of the elements are out in the open and others are well-hidden. Petroglyphs are mostly found in the open, on varnished boulders or cliffs. The careful placement of some of these elements, hiding them from plain sight, meant that a good look around was needed.
I mostly had my eyes peeled for more pictographs so I was taking my time peering at every boulder and cliff face, and after a while I found some faint lines high up on a cliff.
Close by were some cracks in the cliff face, similar to the eponymous crack I originally named the site after, so I clambered upwards and peered in. No, nothing in the first one, and nothing in the others either! I kept wandering along, scanning the cliffs.
In the meantime my companion had tackled another crack, one that was hard to get to and therefore not well-suited to my claustrophobia or difficulty dealing with any heights in excess of a foot or so. I was kind of ignoring it hoping he’d check it out for me, and good thing he did because he made a very nice find. Tucked away all the way at the back of the crack was a nice little petroglyph!
The pictures I have doesn’t do the crampedness of this crack justice. It required a bit of a scramble to even get to the mouth of it, and then you have to precariously perch on the steep, loose soil forming the floor and stretch upwards to see the petroglyph, which is visible in the right center of the picture above, at the back of the crack.
After my companion had looked around it was my turn to brave the crack, hopping up on a boulder where the step was just a little too tall for my legs. I had a couple of false starts before I managed to gain the crack and peer in.
The crack is longer and narrower than my pictures suggest – I didn’t get a photo of its full length. On one side it had a tall, smooth wall of the pinkish rock common in this area, and on the other side a darker grey, coarser stone. This coarser side of the crack was bare, but the other wall had petroglyphs.
The pictures I have were taken by waving the camera in the general direction of the subject. I am always careful not to touch the surface of any boulders at these sites, just in case there is faded pigment I didn’t notice. ( Only exception being if my hide is on the line – you bet I’m grabbing on to a rock then! )
After making sure there is nothing on the rock face opposing than this petroglyph I wriggled closer, steadying myself on the opposing rock face, and twisted around to take this picture. What a strange little petroglyph! There is a simple three-pronged fork at the top. This is a symbol that occurs at other sites on the Tablelands, and it is sometimes interpreted as a bird’s footprint. Bird prints are associated with journeys – physical or spiritual. Below this “bird print” are four rows of dots connected with a bar across the top. This element has a feel similar to the rake elements found throughout the region. This photo and the other one I showed are the only two I have of this petroglyph. Which is a pity, because now that I write the caption for this picture I notice another petroglyph! Do you see it? It is only partially in the frame. Look at the bottom left. There is an element that looks like a simple Rectilinear design at first glance, but it is kind of shaped like a child’s drawing of an animal. There is a trailing “tail” pointing towards the rows of dots. Well! The fact that I didn’t see that element while at the site is testament to how tricky this petroglyph was to reach – I was so focused on it, and on not tumbling backwards out of the crack and down the hill, that I completely missed an obvious element.
As you can see in the picture above, it appears that the smaller petroglyph we saw first is more recent than the larger one, based on the amount of revarnishing, but this method isn’t particularly accurate for estimating relative age and you have to be careful with it – it is more a measure of exposure in general ( which can differ between two sides of the same rock! ) than of age per se. In the picture above you can also see that there are some lichen growing over and around the older element, but none close by the newer element. This could mean that the “newer” element is simply more sheltered and moisture and wind is less likely to reach that portion of the rock. Since desert varnish is caused by the interaction of rain and sunlight, a more sheltered element may be less varnished than a contemporary one in a more exposed spot.
Let’s take a closer look at the other photo of the crack, now that we’ve established there’s more to it than the one element. Can you see the second petroglyph now? This picture seems to show most or all of it. It starts down below the rows of dots and then extends across the lower center portion of the photo. If you’re having trouble finding it, look for the more brightly colored lichen ( the orange and lime green ). This is something I’ve observed at other sites – the bright orange and lime green lichen seem to like growing in petroglyphs. I suspect that the pecks create nice rough spots for the spores to adhere to the rock. With the aid of the lichen we can see the petroglyph zig-zag across the rock and terminate in a circular shape. Very interesting! The styles of the two petroglyphs are different – one is large and sprawling, with thick lines, and the other is small and particular. This may mean that they were made at different times, or by different hands.
Okay, I diverted to describe the additional petroglyphs we found in some detail, but this entry is the “Pictograph Edition” after all! So let’s get back to that …
The pictograph crack. It is just wide enough to admit one and have a little room left over. The left side is smooth and the right side much more weathered. Close by the mouth is a small circle of very faded pigment, which gets me excited.
We continued along the cliff face, past the boulder with the faint red pictograph lines I saw earlier, and discovered another crack to investigate.
Jackpot! This crack was quite narrow, barely admitting one person, but I work my way in and immediately find a small circle of pigment on the smooth face. Promising, but the crack is hard to explore, so I spend some time examining the opposing rock face to make sure it is safe to lean against. The crack is so narrow that I need to press myself against the opposing wall in order to have enough clearance to examine the rock face for more pictographs.
The crack is open to the sky at the top ( the boulder forming the roof is at the back of the crack, where it tapers off into a cramped, dark dead end ) and sunlight and rain have faded the pictographs enormously.
I can tell that there’s more pigment than just the little circle that first caught my attention, but I really can’t tell the shape of the elements or even exactly where they start or end, so I spend a lot of time in the crack peering at the rock and holding the camera out at arm’s length, close to the wall I’m leaning against for maximum coverage, pointing it at the pictographs and blindly snapping pictures.
This is where DStretch on a camera would come in really handy, but I don’t have a camera set up for it. I really should …
Later on I processed my stash of images at home. With luck and persistence I’ve captured the entire pictograph panel, though not in perfectly framed shots. Let’s take a look.
Here’s the little circle of pigment, in the center left of the photo, that first caught my eye. It has faded to a delicate pinkish orange but I know DStretch will have no problems with it.
Wow! Did you expect that? There are many pictographs in this crack – no longer clearly visible with the naked eye, but detailed and well-rendered. Thank you, DStretch.
The designs are abstract and the site has several of the meandering tally lines I’ve seen at Tübatulabal sites, such as the “Tale Of Years” Pictographs. Of course, this site is nowhere near Tübatulabal territory so we cannot necessarily associate them with those designs.
This is my best shot at the lower portion of the panel as it appears to the naked eye today. The little circle of pigment is in the very upper left corner. The rest of the photo shows many faint elements. The shield symbol upper center and its accompanying “bird print” ( three pronged symbol the left of it ) are the clearest elements remaining, along with the circle-and-cross symbol on the lower center, directly below the bird print. Everything else is very faded. We’re going to need some strong DStretch for this one!
Just wow. This DStretch algorithm best shows the pictographs, and what a bounty of pictographs it shows! In the top center is our shield symbol and bird print, along with rakes, more shields, a burst motif, and some tally lines in the upper center. There is also a curious Curvilinear symbol in the lower left. It looks a little like a comet, kind of like the element at the “Comet Cave” Pictographs site. That site is also in Tübatulabal territory.
Here’s the upper part of the panel. For reference, the little circle of pigment is now in the left center of the picture. You can also barely see the sky, showing how close to the entrance this panel is. Let’s have DStretch help us to see what else this panel holds.
Mama Mia! Some of the elements we saw already in the other picture, but look at those tally lines! A very intricate curved tally line, and also a fishbone symbol encased in a circle. This is in addition to the shields and rakes we saw before. There is a feathery rake symbol close to the little circle that was possibly connected to the symbols to its right at some point, and other abstract symbols. One of them, the design at the very lower right, looks quite a bit like one at the “Shelf Life” pictograph site, far away in Joshua Tree National Park ( that one is a digitate version of this design, though ). This is a very busy panel, bursting with vibrance. I wonder what its creator was focused on as the panel was drawn, and what meaning it had.
This panel gives me the feeling that the artist settled in and drew a proliferation of elements all at once, filling up the rock face in front of them. For instance, the curved tally line fits neatly into the space between the other elements and the elements flow easily from left to right, sloping upwards. The panel loses a little bit of its structured feel down low where the artist would have had to crouch down and work right by their knees to paint the elements.
Let’s close out our exploration of this crack with four DStretch photos showing parts of the panel. Some show different groupings than the two photos above to show how well the panel fits together.
Here’s that strange little comet-like element again.
A different vantage point showing most of the panel.
Close-up detail of the fishbone-like element and some of the tally line curves.
A good look at the lower part of the panel. Some of the elements, like the ^ symbol in the lower right, follows a natural rock feature. Just to its left is a figure that might be a basic anthropomorph – or perhaps all these symbols form three or four bird prints descending down the side of the panel.
Well, that was a lot of excitement! It turns out that there was a lot more than just petroglyphs to see at this site.
Like many other sites in the Volcanic Tablelands this one is not a particular secret. Judging by the footprints around the site and the vandalism of the more easily seen elements it sees frequent visitors.
By the way, I’ve never seen a region’s sites vandalized like the ones on the Tablelands. Nearly all the vandalism is in the form of gunshots. Really sad.
If you visit, take your time to explore and find the more hidden aspects of the site. But take care not to damage the site. Don’t touch anything, not even rock faces that you think are bare, unless you’ve looked at them very closely to make sure! These pictographs are already very faded. Please don’t touch them, and please do not chalk them, or any of the other destructive ways people sometimes employ to “make a site better” – all you do is destroy the site. If you want to show where the pictographs are, take photographs and trace on those, or best of all, use DStretch. Also, don’t move rocks around or damage vegetation. The landscape is fragile. Take care to respect the site and help preserve it for other explorers to discover and enjoy.