Petroglyphs in Inscription Canyon

I have visited an awful lot of unique and unusual sites over the years, but rarely have I seen a place that is simultaneously as unassuming, and as evocative, as “Inscription Canyon.” Located deep in the Mojave Desert north of Barstow, California, you have to be willing to do some 4 wheeling in order to get there, so it may not be a trip for the less adventurous.

The landscape here is (as you would expect) barren, foreboding, and starkly beautiful. Temperatures in the summer months routinely top 110 degrees F, rainfall is minimal in the best of seasons, and the most common wildlife are spiders the size of your palm. But the initial bleak impression soon dissolves into a rich, riotous tumble of color, texture and life all leavened by a fascinating history.

The first thing you become aware of is how truly, subtly beautiful the land itself is. What initially seems like a vast sea of tan and brown reveals a palette of pink, cream, purple, red, ochre and green. It’s almost like you have to give your eyes time to adjust to a dark room; eventually the details emerge. There are green verdigris hills, rocks the color of blood oranges and car-sized boulders the shade of lillacs. Great fractured mounds of black volcanic basalt are peppered with garish red-orange lichen. In other places the lichen-covered rocks are like some pastel Jackson Pollock canvas.

Driving through the desert can be unnerving for several reasons: the remoteness, the rugged landscape, the condition of the “roads” and the occasional 10 foot high fences bearing some very ominous-looking “Forbidden Area: Video Surveillance In Use” signs. Seems big parcels of the desert are being used by Uncle Sam for the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, the Army’s National Training Center and the Goldstone Deep Space Tracking Station. The desert quiet is routinely broken by the sonic booms of military jets puncturing the sound barrier.

Before the region’s remoteness became a benefit to the military-industrial complex, it witnessed a steady stream of miners digging for gold, silver, copper and fire opals. The area is riddled with old mine shafts and the leavings of a century and half’s worth of mining and exploitation.

Fortunately for us, 150 years are a shallow breath compared to the 12,000 years of history carved onto the region’s dark rocks.

Inscription Canyon seems to have been gouged out of a slender ribbon of black volcanic rock by a huge knife. The walls of the narrow canyon, while fractured and tumbled, offered the perfect canvas for thousands of years of sacred indigenous art. The exact provenance, meaning and age of these petroglyphs remain largely a mystery. It’s nearly impossible to accurately date them: geologists know the age of the rock they are carved into, but without a larger archeological context from dateable artifacts or other cultural trappings, the carvings themselves can’t be accurately placed in time. Over many centuries the desert itself will coat them with a “patina” that helps to identify the older works – but that simply narrows the range.

And even less is known about the meaning of much of the art. It appears with staggering variety: animals, plants, people, geometric shapes, or any combination of the above. It’s widely held that the carvings were made by shamans, perhaps while experiencing heightened or altered states of awareness brought on by hallucinogens, fasting or ritual. The area seems to have been shared by many groups of native people – nameless archaic tribes, Paiute, Shoshone, and most recently Kawaiisu.

I find it fascinating that petroglyphs all over the world are strikingly consistent in their styles and iconography. I’ve seen petroglyphs in Western Washington State, well over a thousands miles from Southern California, that are extremely similar to the those in Inscription Canyon.

The famed explorer, Sir Richard F. Burton, traveled extensively through North America and learned the “Universal Sign Language” of the North American Indian. A subsequent return to Africa revealed that West African natives used a nearly identical non-verbal language. Some people have theorized that certain petroglyphs are based on the gestures of this universal sign language. Others are much harder to decipher, representing as they do, entry portals to the non-physical world – healing prayers, talismans for sympathetic magic, visions, totems or even flat-out hallucinations. The one thing that is certain is that Inscription Canyon is a unique, powerful sacred site, one that people have responded to for many thousands of years. Sadly, the petroglyphs are under assault from vandalism, pollution, and even time itself. But even modern predations cannot rob the area of its impact, and it is well worth a few hours’ detour through the desert to experience.

The Black Mountain Rock Art District, and Inscription Canyon, are in the National Register of Historic Places and are protected against vandalism and the removal of artifacts by federal law.

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