Joshua Tree: A Land of Subtle, Stark Wonder

I’d never been to Joshua Tree National Park before. I’d heard about it from friends, and often said to myself I should go there, but I never got around to it. Like a lot of things in California, it was so close that it was easy to forget it was there. California is like that, so full of things to see and experience your choices become as congested and difficult to maneuver as the freeways of Los Angeles.  A friend of mine, back from teaching kids in Korea for the winter, asked me to join him on a day long excursion to this special place, and not having seen him in almost two years I could not refuse. Besides, it would be good to get away after a truly awful divorce from someone I thought I could trust. This is also a common thing in California.

Joshua Tree National Park, California

Like most people, in my youth I thought of a desert as a barren, boiling wasteland choked with sand. I thought of Lawrence of Arabia leading a charging army of fierce desert nomads. Deserts were places for the lost and the damned, filled with shallow graves just off the road and swarmed by nefarious hitchhikers and shady characters. Giant worms ridden by noble Fremen charged across endless dunes. It was easy to believe the Hollywood vision. And nothing could be further from the truth (except when it is). Deserts (yes there are different kinds), as varied as any other environment you’ll pass through, team with survivors, creatures so well adapted they thrive in places that can suck the life out of a person in a few hours.

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Pictographs Found

Success!  Team XplorMor has hiked the Piedra Blanca Trail in Los Padres National Forest, located near the Ojai Valley in Southern California, numerous times to study its unusual rock formations, and to seek out the well hidden petroglyphs.  On this last expedition we located them, and discovered three important points: first, there's more than one location, second, it's good they are hidden as one of the locations has serious vandalism, and third, they are not petroglyphs but pictographs.  I'll explain the difference...

XplorMor Piedra Blanca Expedition

There are four major types of rock art: petroglyphs, cupules, geoglyphs, also known as intaglios, and pictographs.  Petroglyphs are rock engravings produced by carving or striking the rock surface using various techniques (See photo: Darien Gap).  Cupules are small cup-shaped indentations made in rock that may appear in a pattern or at random.  They are a type of petroglyph in that stone is ground or carved out to create them.  Geoglyphs are giant drawings made on the ground presumably depicting geometric designs, human forms and animals.

Pictographs are a fragile cousin to petroglyphs.  They are designs drawn on rock surfaces with paints made from natural mineral pigments applied with fibrous brushes or with hands and fingers.  These pigments were mixed with binders such as oil, blood or urine.  Hematite (iron oxide), the most common color in Southern California, was used for creating red paints, and presumably those of Piedra Blanca.  Pictographs were typically drawn in caves, overhangs and alcoves where they would be better protected from harsh weather elements.

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XplorMor Piedra Blanca Expedition