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On 03/30/2011 I visited Grapevine Canyon for the second time, this time with my cousin John from NY who was passing through to visit us on his way home from wintering in New Mexico. We spent a lot more time here than I did on my first visit and I couldn’t believe how many petroglyphs I had missed. They seem to be just everywhere, many located quite high up on the ledges that line the canyon. Even though John’s telephoto lens was larger than mine, I was still able to capture some nice pictures. | |
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Grapevine Canyon is the biggest petroglyph site in southern Nevada. As at other Colorado River locales, representational or figurative motifs are rare at the site; they are heavily outnumbered by geometric designs, many of which are deeply and widely engraved, that defy interpretation. The depth and width of these engravings reflect the fact that Yuman petroglyphs were possibly studied and examined by other tribes and sometimes repecked by them. Still, considerable variation in the degree of revarnishing is evident at the site, indicating that Yuman shamans used this locale probably for many thousands of years. Recent accounts, on the other end of the time scale, tell us that it continued to be used into this century. |
Many of the engravings are complex combinations of geometric forms; enclosed grid and netlike patterns and shield like motifs making them almost uninterpretable. There are some familiar motif types present at the site, however, such as occasional human “stick-like” figures as well as a few "patterned-body” stylized human figures such as the one shown above. | |
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Many who have studied these engravings question whether these more recognizable motifs represent Yuman Petroglyphs or instead were created by non-Yuman shamans. Because Spirit Mountain is sacred to the Native American tribes in this region, it was widely renowned as a place of great supernatural power. It is entirely possible that shamans from different cultures came here for their own types of vision quests, adding their own unique engravings.
| The pictures below were taken on a subsequent hike on 10/12/2011. In the first picture, notice how the three big-horned sheep are depicted as following a “leader” on the far right. What I found striking in the next picture, a close-up of the bottom picture from a different angle, was the shadow that appears to be the left-side profile of a head; almost giving you the feeling that the depictions are being watched over by their creator. |
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