So – we moved over the summer, my computer is still packed away as we’re getting settled in, and there’s been NO time for exploring! Ha.
BUT! We did have some time today to go rambling. We found plenty of exercise and fresh air as well as a couple of things from the past.
Continue readingThe petroglyphs at this site are pretty new-looking – there is not much varnishing at all – but they are very spectacular and they appear authentic. We stopped by this out of the way site one bright morning, and really enjoyed our visit. The petroglyphs are extensive and unique.
Let’s look!
Sometimes you can have a good day by simply pointing the nose of your vehicle off the beaten track.
One spring morning, we were doing just that, leaving one of Nevada’s straight, lonely paved roads and nosing down a dirt track, in search of what lies over the ridge. Think about it: you have a lonely paved road, sparsely travelled … and only a tiny fraction of this road’s sparse travelers ever turn to go beyond the scrubby ridges that make up their horizon as the road they follow winds from basin to ridge to flat to ridge and back down to basin again.
But we wanted to see what the world looked like, and so we followed the dirt road.
This is a smallish site on the Volcanic Tablelands. We first found this site late one freezing winter morning. We had started our day driving out from June Lake and south down the 395, and it was a harrowing experience. Overnight snow left 6-8 inches of powder on the 395, which wasn’t closed yet, and it was still coming down hard as we eased down Deadman’s Summit in 4WD. While trying to tell road from snowbank I hoped that the name of the summit wasn’t about to become prophetic!
Today’s post is about a little site that we visited last fall. We struck out north of our usual stomping grounds, ending up in the southwestern counties of Nevada. There is a lot of pre-history here.
In a lonely, wind-swept saddle between two low hills there is a hot spring, with a cold spring higher up the slope. The ground is speckled with lithic scatter, indicating some prehistoric presence here. There are no suitable rock shelters nearby, so any Native American camps would have been open air camps. Continue reading
We were driving along a dirt road somewhere in the windswept heart of Nevada when I thought that a certain random clump of darkly varnished boulders looked promising, so I convinced my companion to pull over so we could have a look. We donned boots and hoisted cameras. It seemed like we were both down to a single pair of socks that weren’t studded with grass seeds, so this better pan out or we’d waste a good pair of socks on nothing!
I forded through the spiky grass and examined the first boulders. Well shoot. Nothing! Still, that barely means anything. As far as the eye could see, there were boulders lurking in the sea of golden grass, waiting to be examined. In this landscape you’d run out of patience, and the will to live, long before you ran out of boulders.
Fish Cave can be found on the shoreline of ancient lake Lahontan. It was named for the fish fossils found nearby during the the earliest archeological investigations.
This is a nice little site tucked into a quiet corner with development all around. Unfortunately it hasn’t escaped unscathed, even though it is mostly intact.
Somewhere on the Volcanic Tablelands tumbled breccia cliffs lines both sides of a little canyon. On the north side of this canyon, a little above the canyon floor, there is a rock shelter that has been augmented with a low rock wall.
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!
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.