goomba271
05-10-2013, 01:24 AM
Hi All.... This is my first post. I am open to critique and suggestions?
A couple of friends and I decided that it might be fun to 4-wheel down a steep jeep trail and visit a rock art site we had heard about. As usual, the down hill part was the easy part. We had to stop in a couple of places and fill in some deep ruts with stray boulders but we made it down OK in the old Ford Ranger. On the way back out we thought we blew the tranny but it turned out to be a case of the fluid overheating and boiling out. My ticker was on the fritz so my friends hiked out the canyon and somehow managed to find a 4WD tow guy who brought them back along with several bottles of tranny fluid and a very beefy tow vehicle. After filling the tranny with fluid and starting the truck we hooked to the tow vehicle, which in the hands of the maniac driver, gave us a completely insane high speed tow back out to the top. Once we got to the top, it turned out that the fluid was all she needed. We drove her a couple hundred miles home without any problems whatsoever. YEAH!!!!
But back to the rock art visit.... Under cover of the night we followed a fairly obvious path from the trailhead and after several miles arrived at a rock formation which holds one of the most brilliant pictograph caves I've ever visited. There are some unusual colors on a couple of the panels which has led researchers to theorize that some of the pigments (specifically the blue) used may be post-contact in origin... likely from the missions. I've heard others say that it might be a faded out black. Both ideas makes sense to me but, as is the case with most theories, it's impossible to convince everybody of anything so I'll just leave it at that.
I've heard other theories regarding the tribal connections to the site. It seems that experts from one area will 'claim' it as being from the tribes within their area of interest while experts from a different area will claim it for their own tribes. I've seen specific elements that are present in this particular area that seem to compare with specific elements I've seen in various other tribal zones so I'm perfectly OK with the idea that more than one tribe may have visited this site and left their marks.
I don't think that some of the tribal boundaries that have been drawn by various experts mean that there were impenetrable fences erected along those boundaries. Obviously, intertribal trading was a normal occurence and the 'lines' get blurry. The existence of overlapping rock art styles at sites positioned on or near those boundaries makes perfect sense.
Along with my fritzed out ticker, I am color-blind. I find that flash photos tend to bring out some of the colors that I don't see in person under natural lighting conditions. The flash in this case really seemed to make the pictographs 'pop'... at least to my eyes. I also like the way the black background outside the cave contrasts with the colors.
Anyway, here are some flash photos taken from inside the cave... and one of my friends with their headlights scrambling down the steep hillside.
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A couple of friends and I decided that it might be fun to 4-wheel down a steep jeep trail and visit a rock art site we had heard about. As usual, the down hill part was the easy part. We had to stop in a couple of places and fill in some deep ruts with stray boulders but we made it down OK in the old Ford Ranger. On the way back out we thought we blew the tranny but it turned out to be a case of the fluid overheating and boiling out. My ticker was on the fritz so my friends hiked out the canyon and somehow managed to find a 4WD tow guy who brought them back along with several bottles of tranny fluid and a very beefy tow vehicle. After filling the tranny with fluid and starting the truck we hooked to the tow vehicle, which in the hands of the maniac driver, gave us a completely insane high speed tow back out to the top. Once we got to the top, it turned out that the fluid was all she needed. We drove her a couple hundred miles home without any problems whatsoever. YEAH!!!!
But back to the rock art visit.... Under cover of the night we followed a fairly obvious path from the trailhead and after several miles arrived at a rock formation which holds one of the most brilliant pictograph caves I've ever visited. There are some unusual colors on a couple of the panels which has led researchers to theorize that some of the pigments (specifically the blue) used may be post-contact in origin... likely from the missions. I've heard others say that it might be a faded out black. Both ideas makes sense to me but, as is the case with most theories, it's impossible to convince everybody of anything so I'll just leave it at that.
I've heard other theories regarding the tribal connections to the site. It seems that experts from one area will 'claim' it as being from the tribes within their area of interest while experts from a different area will claim it for their own tribes. I've seen specific elements that are present in this particular area that seem to compare with specific elements I've seen in various other tribal zones so I'm perfectly OK with the idea that more than one tribe may have visited this site and left their marks.
I don't think that some of the tribal boundaries that have been drawn by various experts mean that there were impenetrable fences erected along those boundaries. Obviously, intertribal trading was a normal occurence and the 'lines' get blurry. The existence of overlapping rock art styles at sites positioned on or near those boundaries makes perfect sense.
Along with my fritzed out ticker, I am color-blind. I find that flash photos tend to bring out some of the colors that I don't see in person under natural lighting conditions. The flash in this case really seemed to make the pictographs 'pop'... at least to my eyes. I also like the way the black background outside the cave contrasts with the colors.
Anyway, here are some flash photos taken from inside the cave... and one of my friends with their headlights scrambling down the steep hillside.
65898
65899
65900
65901
65902
65903