Okay, so this little site was a complete surprise, and is a bit of a mystery to me!
Backing up a bit: the summer heat had baked us clean out of the high desert, so we fled for the Sierra foothills, only to find that we brought the heat along with us. I was plodding up a slope, head down, thinking thoughts about being another few thousand feet higher up where maybe, finally, the summer heat would let up, and wondering why it felt like I just couldn’t reach that nice-looking rock I wanted to check out … when I lifted my head, saw the rock right in front of me, and … stared blankly at what seemed like a blank rock face.
Or wait … maybe not. Was that pigment? Just a little bit of pigment? Yes? Maybe? ( Please don’t let this excursion be for nothing! )
Sure enough, it was pigment. And I found a bit more around the back of the boulder, too. Well! Good start! The pictographs were extremely faded, though. I peered closely at the rock. Even with polarized sunglasses it felt like the rock stared right back, with all the glare the pale granite could muster under the summer sun – which was a lot!
Yeah, definitely pigment. I fumbled my iPad out of its protective snap cover and called up DStretch. A few shots later I was sure this rock was worth photographing. On the iPad screen it was hard to make out detail, especially in the bright sunlight, but I did my best, framing the boulder in the shots even as the sun bore down and every pore I had opened its floodgates.
Pictures taken, I fled downhill, back to the vehicle. I suddenly felt some sympathy towards Gollum. The mid-summer Sun isn’t friendly!
Once I reached the vehicle I put away a bottle of cold water like it was nothing. It was just too dang hot to be out exploring.
Once I got home and pulled the pictures off the camera I was a bit … surprised. I’m not quite sure what to make of these. So let’s look at them together, shall we?
After a bit of a slog, I look up to see this curious split boulder. Do you see the pigment on either side of the large crack?
Let’s have a closer look. There’s not much on the left side, but there appears to be a curved, hash-marked line on the right side.
Sure enough! I had hoped that really dialing up the intensity at home would reveal that that curved hashmark line was a giant circle covering the boulder face, but sadly I can’t tease anything like that out of the boulder.
It’s the far side of this boulder that really surprised me, though. I found a tiny bit of pigment in the center of it, took a picture with the iPad, looked at it with DStretch, went, hmmmm okay, looks like I need to zoom out a bit … I repeated that a few times until I could see the whole boulder, and I stumbled on this …
Well! What do you make of that? It kind of looks like a sailing ship with a curved prow and stern, doesn’t it? And also two figures standing back of the sail? And two circular elements, one below and one above the boat? And … uhm … is that front figure a little bit … intimidating? Like a hunched over insectoid figure? Maybe?
I’m on firmer ground with concentric circle pictographs, so let’s have a nice close look at this one. It is very faded.
DStretch shows us a nice set of three concentric circles, each with a bit of a peak towards the top.
The other circular element is even more faded.
It appears to be a shield design.
Time to glance back at the main design …
Boy, that ship-like element is still there. It wasn’t just the blistering sun baking my brain a bit too much. In this DStretch enhancement some of the lichen on the rock gets colored in red, but pay attention to the “stern” of the “ship”. Looks like there’s a few slanted cross-hatches there.
Finally, back in more typical pictograph territory, did you notice the Linear element in that upper alcove, way up the boulder?
Here it is again. Notice the lichen growing over the pictograph. This is not a recent pictograph panel. The weathering alone suggests that, but that could be due to a bad binding agent in the pigment. The lichen is perhaps a more reliable indicator of age.
One last, very close look at the element.
It doesn’t quite fit into the indentation in the rock, instead spilling over the edge at the top.
Well, there you go. A very interesting little site. This is in Kawaiisu territory in the Sierra foothills. The linear hashmarks, sometimes circular and sometimes not, are quite common in this area, all the way from the desert floor to the higher elevations, but the large pictograph ( and it is large, about three feet tall I think! ) is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. Very interesting!
Not many people know about this site. The more obvious pictographs on the boulder to the south grab your attention, but you definitely have to have a trained eye to spot this one.
So true – when I first started exploring for rock art I would have walked right by this boulder! Now, many boulders later, I’m finally starting to get the hang of it! Heh heh.
This is a really fascinating little site, unique pictographs. I would love to know more about it. It’s completely different than the adjacent site with its quite obvious pictographs.
While the well-preserved pictograph sites have a magic of their own, I must admit that I also love sites like these, too, where DStretch can reach across time and recall the pictographs.