The Mojave Desert never makes a good first impression. The sprawling basins and naked brown mountains, sparsely dotted with ragged Creosote bushes, offer little reason to linger. We prefer to pass on through in search of a more verdant setting.
But any environment, no matter how desolate it might appear, hides special surprises for those who pause to look. Surprisingly, a mobile population of Native Americans thrived for thousands of years in the Mojave Desert, staying a while each year on their seasonal rounds. I recently went with friends on a tour to see and touch what they left behind.
A group of friends converged in Ridgecrest, Calif., a desert town of 28,000 within sight of the southern end of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The town is adjacent to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a 1.1-million acre installation larger than the state of Rhode Island. On the base, in a canyon deep in the Coso Mountains are thousands of petroglyphs – the largest concentration in the western hemisphere.
Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, with the cooperation of the Navy, offers tours of Little Petroglyph Canyon, the remote site of the ancient art. We had come to Ridgecrest for the tour.
The Navy takes the presence of civilians on its base very seriously. We had been mailed a list of strict instructions – picture ID, passport, no alcohol and no cameras while driving in – that must be met in order to enter the base. A military policeman gave us a no-nonsense review at the base entrance. We were required to open the doors and trunks of our vehicles and step away while each was searched. During the search, he asked if any of us had alcohol. I remembered that we had wine for our upcoming visit to Death Valley. When I admitted our mistake, his disgust was evident, and I wasn’t sure if I would have to take a lap or give him 20.
Satisfied that none of us presented a threat to national security, we hopped in our cars and followed our tour guide on a 45-mile drive into the Coso Mountains, a trip that passed wild horses and revealed views of Mt. Whitney far to the west.
Little Petroglyph Canyon, also called Renegade Canyon, is more like a desert wash or ravine with walls that rarely reach more than 20 feet. As we stepped down to the sandy bottom, the show began right away. Native American artists chipped away the dark veneer of the basalt canyon walls to create the light-colored petroglyphs. There are thousands of images, low and high, on the walls along the three-quarter mile stretch we walked.
Scholars agree that the petroglyphs in this canyon date back to the Early Archaic, 10,000 years ago and peaked about 1,500 years ago. There are all types of shapes and patterns: weapons, human images, animals and an array of abstract images like circles and rectilinear images. One of the most common and interesting to me was the bighorn sheep.
While the figures in the canyon are beautiful and interesting, it seems to me that the trick is to imagine a time millennia ago when the artists were right here, chipping images, talking and living their lives. A little imagination conjures a strong sense of their presence, with you among them, in a remote canyon in the Coso Mountains.
Tours cost $40 per person and are available most weekends through early June. Reservations are required. Information is available at the Maturango Museum website (www.maturango.org).
