Creepy Cold Storage Cave - Joshua Tree National Park

I have many more historical desert related posts coming, so I hope you aren't getting tired of them yet. We've spent so much time in the desert the past couple of years and seen so many things, that I've become totally backed up (posting wise). In addition, I had no idea exactly what would happen when I decided to combine  my old written blog with my photo/travel blog a few years ago. Now I know.  If I am to ever catch up, I need to start posting more and doing it on a regular basis, If I do, I hope you will still find them interesting enough to comment and thereby validate my fragile existence.
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Enough of that...  I have read and been told that some people find things like ancient rock art and artifacts kind of creepy. I understand, but don't feel anything like that myself. At least, I didn't until I first saw this little spot the winter before last.

Just some bare winter trees and branches. Nothing creepy about that, right? I walked right past this spot and didn't give it a thought. My wife was about twenty yards behind me and called out my name. Being a more astute explorer than myself, she parted the branches to see what might be on the other side. I walked back to her and took a peek. I believe my response was something close to...

Oh shite!  

Because to me, this looked like the teeth, gaping mouth and jaws, of something scary and not-of-this-world. I could even see right down its throat! I admit it, I got chicken skin (chill bumps) in about one second.

A closer look cleared it all up. There was some wild erosion on this spot and it hollowed out a large boulder. At some point in the distant past a Shaman (most likely) painted a couple of pictographs in the cavities of the cave. Later on, some rancher/settler type, used the rightmost cavity as what looks to be a cold-storage cave. It's pretty nice stone work, but today, it would land him with a hefty fine and/or jail time.  Rightly so, I might add! There is also a bedrock mortar (or mortero) in front of it. 

The pictographs aren't very bright now, but we could still see them pretty easily.

Even better, when enhanced with DStretch

A closer view. This "rake" looking pattern is believed to represent rain.

A better look at the bedrock mortar

Cactus growing out of the top of a nearby rock formation

Although it looks like old trash, these very old and rusted cans are also historic. They aren't held in the same regard as pictographs, petroglyphs, or cupules, but are historic just the same. In the context of this place, they are part of the story. If you find things like this, in places like this, please let them lie where you find them.

I recently took my granddaughter to this place. You can tell by her face, what she thinks of it. We may have a budding archaeologist on our hands. She denies it though and says she wants to be a baker. 

I have something from JTNP that is is even creepier than this! Coming up soon...

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Did You Wash Your Hands?

Just a short-one today...

I've spent a large chunk of time in places that either don't have outhouses and/or bathrooms, or maybe just have "vault" toilets. I'm sure you're asking yourself, "why in the world is he telling us that?"  I'm just giving you a little background info. Umkay?
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I spent a lot of my childhood at my grandma's house. It was actually more like a cabin. Not a mountain cabin, but a desert version. It was a very rustic place, but it did have an indoor bathroom and septic tank. Normally, that would be a great convenience, but we (me and my brother) were never allowed to use it during the day or evening hours, we could use it in the middle of the night, but only if we couldn't wait until morning. 

That means that ninety-nine percent of the time, we used the outhouse. Upon our return, there was never a single word said about washing our hands. However, on the rare occasion that we used the indoor bathroom (snow, rain, thunderstorms, etc). She ALWAYS asked if we had washed our hands. 

Is that more than a bit odd, or is it just me?

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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Stonewall Mine (abandoned) and Cuyamaca City (less than a ghost town) - Cuyamaca Mountains

On this day (last August), my goal was to hike to the long abandoned Stonewall gold mine and the remains of Cuyamaca City. We were camped about seven miles from the mine.

The Hike
Instead of taking the road that led directly to the mine, I wanted to approach the area from the backside and only drove my car part way. That left me with about a four-mile round trip hike.

While there, I decided to hike around beautiful Lake Cuyamaca. That added a a couple of miles to my jaunt. I have no idea how much more was added during my search, for any remains of the mining camp (Cuyamaca City). In the background are Stonewall Peak and Little Stonewall Peak.

 Sometimes there were trails and sometimes there weren't

A gorgeous mountain meadow

The Mine
The Stonewall Jackson mine was established in 1870. For post-civil war political reasons, the Jackson portion of the name was dropped.  It is said to have been the most lucrative gold mine in Southern California history and started a local gold rush.

THEN (circa 1889)

The main shaft and much of the mine equipment was housed in these buildings.

 NOW

A few random pieces of mine equipment 

The collapsed main vertical shaft

The tall main building (the hoist house) was directly over this shaft. Not a trace of it remains. There is nothing left of any of the other buildings either.  The mine ceased operations in 1890. In many places, mines are simply abandoned; that isn't exactly the case here. It is said that most of the lumber was reused in the town of Julian.

The Town
The town (or mining camp) was first called Stonewall, then Stratton and eventually Cuyamaca City. At one point Cuyamaca City had a population of about 500 people.  There was a post office, housing for mine workers and their families, a school and a boarding house/hotel.  I'd been to the mine before (by car) and knew what to expect there. This hike was to see what remained of the town. I had heard there were foundations and even a couple of old structures still there. What I found was just about nothing. All of it had been damaged in past wildfires and then totally destroyed in the massive Cedar Fire of 2003. I SURE WISH SOMEBODY HAD TOLD ME ABOUT THAT AHEAD OF TIME!
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We were in this area again for the last several days. I will do another post with some better photos and a surprise find very soon. 


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