The Petroglyphs At Steam Wells, California

You won't find Steam Wells, California on ordinary road maps; you'll need a U.S. Geological Survey map to find this petroglyph site. It is east of the semi-ghost town of Red Mountain, CA, on public land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. To reach it, you take Highway 395 north off Interstate 15 until you reach the town of Red Mountain. Turn east onto Trona Road and follow it a couple of miles until you reach the turnoff for RM14444, a graded dirt road, on the right. At this point, you will be "behind" Red Mountain, a highly oxidized basaltic cinder cone that now has a reddish coloration. Because of the maze of dirt roads branching off from RM1444, you'lll need a good USGS map or directions from the local BLM office to find this site. While a 4WD vehicle isn't usually necessary, deep sand can accumulate on sections of the roads so a 4WD vehicle or a truck with a robust low gear is a good idea.

This is the high desert of southern California, with an elevation of about 3500 feet. Winter is a great time to visit, as it is cool and critters such as rattlesnakes are hibernating in their dens. You'll need to hike about a mile from the road to reach Steam Wells, and the petroglyph site is a basaltic outcropping that rises about one hundred feet over the surrounding area-----it is easily visible as you approach the site. Another clue you're getting close will be a distinctive "rotten egg" smell. This is a geothermally active area and steam wells were drilled to power mining activities at this location in the 1930s. While the wells have since been capped, they do leak enough to create an odor.

The petroglyphs are scraped into the basaltic boulders making up the outcropping. As you climb the outcropping, most of the boulders you'll see will have designs like the ones seen in the photos below:










When you reach the summit of the outcropping, you get an outstanding view of the surrounding desert------talk about being isolated!!-------and there are some petroglyphs at the top:


I have been reluctant to write about the Steam Wells petroglyphs because they have already been damaged by "outlaw archaeologists" who deal in the thriving black market for pre-Columbian artifacts. As you can see below, someone has very professionally cut away some of the petroglyphs, and those missing petroglyphs doubtlessly decorate the home or office of someone with more money than sense. Isolation and limited BLM resources makes sites like this sitting ducks for thieves.




After visiting the petroglyphs, you can follow your nose to the site of the actual steam wells, as shown below. I visited on a January day with the temperatures in the lower 40s, and I could actually see a few wisps of steam floating away from the well nozzles. The smell got a lot worse the closer you got to the wells, so I didn't spend much time there!

The Petroglyphs At Swansea, California

Swansea, California is a ghost town site located about ten miles south of Lone Pine, CA, along Highway 136. It is located on the eastern shore of the Owens Lake dry lake bed, bordering a vast expanse of white alkaline deposits. There is not much left of Swansea, and I'll blog about that ghost town in the future. Today I'm going to write about a series of remarkable petroglyphs found near Swansea on the east side of Highway 136.

Most of the petroglyphs found in the southwestern United States were made on basaltic rock, but the Swansea petroglyphs were made on marble. Because marble is a harder rock than basalt, making the Swansea petroglyphs must have been a difficult task. Fortunately, it also means the Swansea petroglyphs are very well preserved compared to most basaltic petroglyphs:






So far, these look like very typical petroglyphs. They depict game animals (note the bighorn sheep in the second photo above) as well as astronomical objects (the starburst at left in the photo above). They also include the random geometric patterns indicative of hallucinations induced by native tobacco, lack of sleep and food, etc.

What makes the Swansea petroglyphs a bit controversial is the presence of supposedly Christian and European symbols in them, such as the cross you can see in the photo below:


Some of the Swansea petroglyphs supposedly represent horses, which were unknown in North American prior to the arrival of the Spaniards:


The Swansea petroglyphs are the inspiration for a very unusual web site called The Equinox Project, which claims the Swansea site is proof of European exploration of North America------principally by the Celts-----over 1000 years ago!

Frankly, the Equinox Project's claims are profoundly unconvincing and more than a little demented. But the Swansea petroglyphs are well worth a visit for their own sake.

The Pictographs At Ayers Rock, California

Petroglyphs are native American rock art scratched into rock (usually volcanic basalt) with stone tools, whereas pictographs are painted onto rock surfaces using naturally occurring pigments from plants, muds, etc., and natural straw and grasses as "paintbrushes." Because pictographs are more vulnerable to rain, humidity, and wind than petroglyphs, fewer survive today. One of the best preserved sites I've visited is Ayers Rock in the northern regions of California's Mojave Desert. It's east of Coso Junction on California highway 395, and is reached by a convoluted series of graded dirt roads. Exact directions can be obtained from a Bureau of Land Management office or at the combination service station/Taco Bell in Coso Junction; there's a large Cal Trans rest area just before the exit for Coso Junction. When I did this visit in 2000, the roads were suitable for passenger cars with careful driving but I think a high clearance vehicle would be a wiser choice. The distance from Coso Junction to the site is about eight miles.

There is a crudely graded dirt parking area for Ayers Rock, with a trail of about three-quarters of a mile to the site. The parking area is marked with the sign below, which gives various admonishments for visitors:

While the trail to the rock is faint------the shifting sands make a more permanently-worn trail difficult to create----the rock itself is clearly visible from the trailhead and impossible to miss. Unless you're visiting in mid-winter on a day when the temperature doesn't push past 60, I suggest carrying a snake stick or walking very carefully, taking note of the trail ahead and the areas adjacent to the trail. I took these photos on a day when the temperature was about 80, and spotted four sidewinder rattlesnakes near the trail, including one that zipped across the trail about ten feet ahead of me!






So what did I get for my courageous decision to risk death by the hand of venomous serpents somewhere in the desert hinterlands of the American Southwest? Well, I got see some really cool, surreal pictographs like the ones below:






I've tried to figure out what the image below is supposed to be; my first guess is that it is a scorpion, although it also looks quasi-human. Those zany Native Americans!






At the rear of Ayers Rock is a small, cave-like tunnel that would be adequate to shelter one person from the sun, wind, and the little rain that fell in this area. The sides appear streaked with smoke film, and I suppose fires were lit here for cooking (roasted sidewinder rattlesnake??) or for warmth on winter nights (the elevation here is slightly over 4000 feet, and freezing temperatures are common on mid-winter nights). It's easy to picture a native shaman or medicine man in here, depriving himself of food and water, smoking the vaguely psychedelic native tobacco, all to induce the hallucinations recorded in the pictographs. That's what archaeologists say, at any rate; I have a sneaking suspicion all lot of rock art was just random scrawling and doodling, much like contemporary "tagging" graffiti:







The surrounding area of Ayers Rock is littered with numerous obsidian chips, leftovers from the numerous lava flows. Obsidian was widely used by Native Americans in the Southwest for arrowheads, knives, animal skinning tools, and other applications where a strong rock that could hold a sharp edge was required. It is known that native peoples from as far away as eastern Utah traveled to this area to trade for obsidian gathered by the native peoples of the Coso Junction. As a result, many of the petroglyphs and pictographs found in this region are a mishmash of symbols representing various cultures of the natives of the Southwest.

Who knows. . . . . . . . maybe in future millennia people will visit ruins in abandoned, desolate lower Manhattan, ponder the strange symbols on a religious relic known as a "trading board," and ponder yes, this is where primitives of the distant past gathered to engage in a mystical ceremony known as "trading heating oil futures". . . . . . . .

The Petroglyphs Of Kelbaker Road, California

Baker, California is a godforsaken spot along Interstate 15 midway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Its raison d'etre is to serve as a place to grab some food, use a restroom, and pump a tank of gasoline while traveling from the City of the Angels to Sin City. (It was also the setting for the movie The Big Empty, but that's another story.) Baker happens to be the northern terminus of Kelbaker Road, which runs south through the Mojave National Preserve and the "town" of Kelso. And along Kelbaker Road are some nice petroglyphs and a couple of caves where the petroglyph makersonce lived.

This site is not listed in guidebooks, and I'm grateful to the rangers at the Barstow, California office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for cluing me in about it. The site is a little over thirteen miles south of Baker in the Mojave National Preserve. The basaltic rock outcropping below will be visible on your left when you're near the starting point for the hike to the site; a dry stream bed will also be obvious:



















When you get to this location, you hike east-----that is, toward Las Vegas-----for about a mile. On your right will be dark basaltic cliffs like the ones below. The petroglyphs and caves are very obvious when you finally get to them.




















You have to climb up the rocks to reach the petroglyphs and caves, but they should pose no problems; I did it without any climbing gear. When you do, you'll find two shallow caves with petroglyphs as well as separate petroglyph panels. Here are the two cave entrances:





































The cave walls and rock panels have petroglyphs like these:




































This is the view north from one of the caves. Interstate 15 runs parallel to those mountains in the distance. I wonder what the petroglyph makers would think if they could see this view at night; what would they think of those small moving lights in the distance? If they indeed possessed some special wisdom lost to modern man, does this mean they would not have been seduced by Mitt Romney's oily disingenuousness? Would they wish for a CB radio so they could talk to the long haul truckers zooming by on Interstate 15??

I do not have the answers to such questions.

The Petroglyphs Of Fallon, Nevada

Like ghost towns, petroglyph sites are outdoor history museums. Technically, there are two types of Native American rock art sites: petroglyphs, which are scraped or scratched into the surface of a rock, and pictographs, which are painted onto rock. Petroglyphs are more common because they were easier to make and more durable. Dark basaltic rock (a product of lava flows from volcanoes) was a favorite surface for petroglyph artists, and most of the sites are near current or ancient water sources.

There’s a lot of fanciful hooey circulating about petroglyphs, but the bottom line is that we really have no idea what the symbols mean nor do we know why they were created. Some feel they had some sort of spiritual or religious significance (perhaps to record hallucinations experienced during “vision quests”) while others say they were used to mark tribal land boundaries, record battles, indicate hunting areas, etc. Many of these “explanations” are detailed and superficially convincing, but all are nothing more than subjective interpretations; asking what petroglyphs mean is like asking what the Mona Lisa is smiling about. Personally, I suspect many are the equivalent of contemporary graffiti, namely random scribblings made by bored people with nothing better to do.

Fallon, Nevada is about 400 miles north of Las Vegas and 60 miles southeast of Reno. I originally visited there to do research for my book Top Secret Tourism; the petroglyphs were just a bonus. Fallon is a dumpy little town that serves as the seat of Churchill county (the county courthouse is a rambling two-story wood structure resembling a New England bed-and-breakfast) and as the location of Fallon Naval Air Station, the new home of the “Top Gun” fighter pilot school immortalized in the movie Top Gun.

While Fallon is located in arid central Nevada, there are some surprisingly green patches around it-----in fact, some high-grade hay is grown there. That’s because Fallon has areas of abundant groundwater, including several flowing springs. The petroglyph site is located near such springs, and the petroglyphs are found on several dozen rocks scattered around the springs.

As you might suspect from a desert-dwelling people, rattlesnakes are a common motif at Fallon. Note the broad, triangular head of the snake figure at left below; that head shape indicates a pit viper, and "rattlers" are the only pit vipers in the Great Basin desert:


















But other figures are less easy to interpret. Yes, there are snake figures on some of the rocks below, but your guess is as good as mine as to what the other images are supposed to represent:























































In the background of the photo below is Fallon Naval Air Station, the current home of the "Top Gun" school. The petroglyph figure looks like a ghost or phantom. Consider that the star of Top Gun, Tom Cruise, adheres to a religion which holds that all human suffering is caused by invisible entities which attach themselves to humans, and such entities live underground and are released through volcanic eruptions (that's why those copies of Dianetics always have an erupting volcano on the cover). The Fallon petroglyphs are on basaltic rocks from an ancient volcanic eruption; did the petroglyph-maker manage to glimpse of one of those entities and record his experience on rock? Suppose the movie Top Gun had been made in the 1990s, and Tom Cruise had to go to Fallon for filming. Further suppose he had glimpsed the petroglyph below. Would he have fled Fallon in terror?? Would he have come to his senses, realized his religion was congealed gibberish, and as a result still be happily married today to Nicole Kidman???

Those are the sorts of thoughts that go through my head when I'm visiting a place in The Great Empty of the American west.