Hexie Mountains - Desolate and Beautiful - Joshua Tree National Park

I apologize for my absence here. We've been out there, doing what we do, but I just haven't had much free time lately. I have plenty of backed up posts in draft form. Some from places, some stories and some that are just the general nonsense I post from time to time.
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Onward....
The Hexie Mountains are a desolate and beautiful place. Clearly off the sightseeing agendas of those who visit Joshua Tree National Park. This area is pure wilderness. No people, but there are animals and they only have two things to worry about...

 Finding food and avoiding becoming food!

My wife and I spent the better part of a day here and didn't see another person. The same is true for the last time I was there. Even human footprints are few and far between. 

We found some of what we were looking for, some things we weren't looking for and didn't have time to find a couple of things that I knew the location of (that sucked!).

 We could have easily spent two or three days in this area. It is beautiful.

Remember those wooden Tiki necklaces people used to wear? I thought this guy looked like one of them.

Okay, enough of the scenery for now. I really liked the eroded little arch in the middle of these boulders. These were just a fraction of the photos I took. Rock formations may all look alike to some folks, but not to me. They are all different and all beautiful.  By the way, none of the these photos necessarily relate to the next group of photos. I'm not going to make it that easy for anybody (if you catch my drift).

There are many clues that this area was lived in by local Indians for a long while. This bedrock mortar (mortero) was close to a quarter mile from....

 This broken milling stone or "slick" 

Here is a close-up of the same stone. You can see that it is worn smooth on top and slightly concave. As I look at this photo, I wish I had given a closer look to the small dark stone to the left of it. I'd bet a donut that the bottom side of that rock is also smooth and was used to grind things (as a mano) on the larger one.

This is the side opening into the high point of the day.  It leads into...

 This rock shelter! The shelter is great on it's own, but reaches amazing stature because of...

These rocks! They appear to have been arranged a very long time ago. They aren't just sitting there, like it was recently done, they have settled into the ground (or the ground is reclaiming them). I'd say maybe it was a fire ring, but I didn't see any ashes around it at all, nor did I see any smoke or carbon stains on the rocks around or above it. Maybe it was a cache for weapons, food, etc. Although caches were usually created in higher, more isolated and protected locations. I have no idea what it is and I'm fine with that. 

In another area, there were some petroglyphs (pecked, scratched, scraped into rocks) and pictographs (painted in some manner onto rocks). If you look at the center and just to right of center, you can see a grid design scraped into the stone. 

Here is a closer look at the petroglyph. It is very faded and probably easier to see in the other photo. When this design was created, it would have been scratched through the desert varnish (the dark stuff) and right into the rock. It takes many centuries and sometimes thousands of years for the "varnish" to reform to the point where it totally covers and destroys the petroglyph. this panel looks to almost be at that point.

 Very close to the petroglyph in the last photo, is this small alcove. In the alcove is a....

  human form (anthropomorphic) pictograph.

 Here is the same pictograph after enhancing with DStretch

One more small pictograph 

Even enhanced with DStretch, I have no idea what it is. 

This is an awesome big panel of petroglyphs! Unfortunately, they are also just about gone. 

Same photo as above, but tweaked a little bit. It doesn't help very much, but if you look at it closely, there are some interesting shapes. One actually does look kind of like a flying saucer. Ancient Alien theorists believe that..... Sorry, too much cable TV.

About a quarter mile away from that last photo, are two more bedrock mortars and at least one cupule. In case you don't remember, cupules are an ancient form of rock art (maybe the oldest). The cupule is to the right of the larger mortar and towards the edge. I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't have started a new mortar in that spot.

These next four photos and the first few, don't necessarily have any relation to the rock art, shelter, or mortars. They are here so you can see why we think this area is so beautiful. I think this looks like an eel. 

I included this photo, because it looks almost exactly like one from another part of the park. One that I can't seem to find right now.

That is all for now! 

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