This site is a companion site to the “Be Hip or be Square” pictograph site. They are both in the same mountain range and both painted on a side wall of a mining adit that petered out.

This similarity makes me think that they are contemporary, but this site is more rudimentary than its companion, and the design of the pictographs at the two sites doesn’t really have much in common.

Still, this is another site that we know can at most be as old as the adit, and the adit won’t be older than 1860, a few years before the first forays into mining in this area.

The adit entrance. That ceiling of conglomerate sure looks like a bucket of nope, doesn’t it? It seems like the creator of these pictographs agreed – they are painted close to the entrance, in the open, where that ton of rocks couldn’t come down to cause damage. The downside of that is that the pictographs are now very hard to discern due to weathering.

After we visited the first site there was some unpleasant side hill scrambling as we investigated other natural nooks and crannies in the same range, hoping to discover more.

The two indistinct splotches of pigment is still pretty obvious, sheltered below a slight bulge in the rock wall. It looks like there’s more to see just above it, but it is hard to tell for sure. This panel is very weathered.

At one point a scree slope caused us some trouble and throughout we gained more and more prickly grass seeds in our boots and socks. A day later I would spend a good ten minutes carefully picking spikes from the collar of my boots in order to ensure putting them on didn’t feel like putting my feet in a steel trap!

This first foray gained us nothing and and we returned to our vehicle to drive further along the dirt road we were following. The sun sank lower and bored straight into my eyes as I squinted at the road ahead. Good thing there’s not a lot of traffic on these barely-wide-enough-for-one-and-a-half-vehicle dirt roads!

After a while we rounded a corner and saw a dark opening high up the hillside.

Could lightening strike twice?

I pulled over and parked, and we started trudging towards the mine adit we’d spotted. As we slogged up the hill we struck an old mining road, of the sort that chose the shorter route over the easier one and therefore was basically just a slightly less overgrown patch of turf shooting straight up the slope. Still, it offered a path to keeping our socks from becoming more seed-encrusted than they were, so we hauled ourselves up the slope with the long, slow steps of the weary.

Finally we managed to reach the mouth of the adit. Unlike the companion site where we had to peer into the dark tunnel, the pictographs were immediately obvious here, right at the mouth of the adit.

Unfortunately, that also meant that they were very weathered.

Some DStretch gives a reasonable idea of what used to be here. Each of the two blobs of pigment, visible here as the two large red dots at the bottom of the panel, has some elements above it, are topped by a line that starts with a small bulb and projects upwards. Above the rightmost blob is something that looks like a check mark. Let’s shift around a little bit and see if we can’t get a better angle on that smudge of pigment above the leftmost blob. Maybe it also has some sort of shape to it when viewed closely.

This lower angle wasn’t entirely helpful, but we got a slightly better look all the same. Maybe a dot with a couple of digits radiating away from it? This angle also shows how the two vertical lines seem to start from the point of a ^ shape that was filled in with pigment.

I knelt down in the dirt to get my camera and shoot some pictures, then turned to gaze out over the plains below.

A glance out over the desolate plain below, bathed in dusky golden light from the sinking sun.

The peace and quiet welling up from the plains below unwound the last frazzled strands of the daily grind still clinging to my soul. I breathed in deeply, enjoying the still desert air, and spoke a few words to my companion. We turned towards our vehicle.

The day was done: another day of togetherness and exploration complete. We had travelled many miles that day, just to stand right where we were at that moment. It is easy to lose sight of the moment in the daily scurry of making a living, but it is the moment that holds the joy of being alive. We slowly made our way back to our vehicle, in no hurry to let go of the calm evening.

If you visit this site, respect the remnants of the past. This site and its companion are a pretty rare overlap of Native American culture and prospecting. Leave it as is for others to visit.