The Volcanic Tablelands north of Bishop is one of those places you either know and love or have no idea exists.
For rock climbers and desert wanderers it is an exciting spot, offering many problems to work and remote places to explore, respectively.
For everyone else it is dreadfully dull, something to be zipped by ( going downhill ) or crept past ( going uphill ) as you navigate the steep Sherwin Grade on the nearby US 395.
In many ways the shield design is the defining element found in the Great Basin. Rectilinear elements are also really common – not to mention the famous Coso bighorn sheep representations further south – but the shield design pops up at sites all over the region.
This particular site consists of almost nothing but shield designs. The main site consists of eleven well-defined shields on a large upright boulder with a smooth, level north face, and some less well-executed elements lower on the same rock face.
These petroglyphs are found along a sandstone cliff on the eastern side of Chalfant valley. Because sandstone is a relatively soft rock, most of the designs are deeply incised, often with V-shaped grooves, in contrast to the more shallowly ‘pecked’ petroglyphs one sees in harder rock such as volcanic basalt. Since most other petroglyph sites in the area are in volcanic basalt, this site is something of an outlier.
This site stretches about a quarter of a mile along a north-south wash. The sandstone bluff it is carved on sits on the western side of the wash. The designs are mostly high off the ground, suggesting that the bottom of the wash has been eroded down since the petroglyphs were carved.
The following series of photographs follows the wash south to north, taking in the various designs on the cliff faces.
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.
This is one of the most extensive sites I’ve visited to date. I have been on the lookout for it for a while, managing to narrow down my search via scraps of information gathered here and there … and also, mainly, by the time-honored tradition of simply not finding it, over and over! ( Hey – knowing where it isn’t also counts as narrowing down the search, right? )
Early one morning I was out hunting specifically for this site. I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be too hard to actually see if I could just find myself in the general vicinity of it, since the photographs I’d seen made it appear large enough to be visible from some distance away.
This petroglyph site can be found on a marble outcropping on the northeast shoreline of what was once Lake Owens. The type of stone alone makes this site unusual, since petroglyphs are usually found on volcanic rock or perhaps sandstone, both of which are much easier to work than a hard material such as marble.
This site is enormous – not in terms of surface area as much as in the sheer number of panels and petroglyphs it contains. Around 500 elements are spread across about 25 separate panels on this volcanic outcropping.
As is common with known sites, this one has suffered vandalism. Some designs are defaced, often by gunshots, and some panels have crude designs scratched on them. Fortunately, the majority of the site is still intact.
In the following overview, the path taken around the formation starts at the center of an east-facing alcove and proceeds widdershins (anti-clockwise). The photos follow in that same order.
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These pictographs are found in a low cave at the foot of a volcanic ridge. This low cave is about 5 feet high, requiring one to stoop to enter. It is fairly wide, though – probably three or so times as wide as it is high.
This site is perched in a steep draw, close to good water sources. As such, there are plentiful signs of habitation scattered among the jumble of boulders in the vicinity.