February 2014 Posts:
UPDATE/Death Valley - Death Valley National Park
Death Valley - Billie Mine (Death Valley)
Death Valley - 20 Mule Team Road
Death Valley - Borax Mining at Death Valley
Death Valley - Ryan Camp (Lila C Mine) - Death Valley California
Corn Creek - Corn Creek Station (DNWR) - Trip Notes for 02/22/2014
UPDATE - Aztec Tank and Contact Mine
Goodsprings - Aztec Tank - Trip Notes for 02-20-2014
Searchlight - Searchlight Nevada - A Living Ghost Town
UPDATE - Desert National Wildlife Range
Desert National Wildlife Range - Fossil Ridge (North End) - DNWR
UPDATE - Daytrip - Corn Creek Station (DNWR)
Corn Creek/DNWR - Corn Creek Station (DNWR)
Petroglyphs/Valley of Fire - Mouse's Tank Petroglyphs (Valley of Fire)
Petroglyphs/Valley of Fire - Atlatl Rock Petroglyphs (Valley of Fire)
UPDATE - Furnace Creek Area (Death Valley National Park)
Death Valley - Golden Canyon (Death Valley)
Death Valley - Badwater Basin (Death Valley)
Gold Butte - Little Finland (Gold Butte)
Gold Butte - Black Butte Dam (Gold Butte)
Gold Butte - Falling Man Site (Gold Butte)
Gold Butte - Gold Butte Back Country Byway
Red Rock Canyon - Blue Diamond Trails Hike
Saturday
Black Butte Dam at Gold Butte National Monument
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This page last updated on 03/18/2018
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04/25/2017 Trip Notes: Today I visited this dam again with Harvey Smith, Bob Croke and Jim Herring. In addition to nice view from the top of the dam, we got to observe something vary unusual. As you can see from the picture in (Fig. 06), there is a very large meadow like area behind the dam. In the driest portion of the meadow directly behind the dam we observed more than a half dozen small frogs or toads emerging directly out of the ground.
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Back to [Gold Butte National Monument - Summary Page] |
Atlatl Rock Site Rock Art (Summary Page)
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This page last updated on 10/11/2017
This page last updated on 10/11/2017
Introduction: As I began to discover more and more rock art sites during my hikes over these past several years, I have become witness to far too many examples of where persons had seemed fit to deface them with graffiti and other examples of damage. Eventually I realized that the sharing of my hiking adventures could have the potential to increase public exposure, and thereby increasing the possibility for even more damage. As a result, I decided to preface each of my rock art pages with the following information to help educate visitors about the importance of these fragile cultural resources. Before scrolling down, I implore you to READ the following ... as well as the linked page providing guidelines for preserving rock art.
Here are a few simple guidelines you can follow that will help to preserve these unique and fragile cultural resources that are part of our heritage. Guidelines for Preserving Rock Art. If you would like to learn more about the Nevada Site Stewardship Program, go to my page ... Nevada Site Stewardship Program (NSSP).
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| Atlatl Rock: Atlatl Rock has some of the most outstanding examples of petroglyphs in the park. There are two sets of petroglyphs located here are out in the open; one grouping about 40 to 60 feet above the ground, requiring you to climb up a stairway which is about 40 feet high Fig. 01); the second grouping in on the rock cliff just above ground level to the left of the steel stairway (Fig. 02). The grouping of images at the top of the stairway appear to tell some kind of story, providing room for many interpretations. If you look at the specific elements, you can see feet, sheep, atlatl's, a cross, a ladder, zig-zag lines, concentric circles and other images. | ||
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| Petroglyph History at Valley of Fire(1): During the period from approximately AD 1 to about 1200, the Valley of Fire region was occupied by pit house dwellers and eventually by farmers living in small permanent villages. They were similar in many ways to the prehistoric Anasazi or Puebloan peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, rather than to the archaic Hunter-gatherer cultures typical of the larger Great Basin. This period corresponds to a more favorable, wetter climatic regime that essentially allowed rainfall agriculture to spread northward beyond the Colorado Plateau onto the fringes of the Great Basin. Whether the farmers who occupied this region during this period were Great Basin peoples who adopted agriculture and a Pueblo lifestyle, or alternatively whether the ancestral Basin hunter-gatherers temporarily were pushed aside by Puebloan groups moving north, is not known. Many archaeologists favor the hypothesis that the Valley of Fire was occupied by Puebloan peoples who pushed northward. |
| It is clear, however, that after about AD 1200-1300, a time of great drought, the Numic ancestors of the Southern Paiute occupied this portion of southern Nevada. More to the point is the fact that Altatl Rock contains petroghyphs that are fully characteristic of the prehistoric and ethnographic cultures of the Great Basin, but it also contains some motifs that are more typical of Puebloan rock art sites and presumably date to the period when farming was practiced here. |  |
| These include birds drawn in profile, plants, outlined stars, and phallic stick-figure human motifs with bent arms and legs. Although we do not know whether the Puebloan style rock art was also made by shamans to depict vision quests, like the Numic petroghyphs, it is clear that Altatl Rock was a place where cultures intermixed, and a place that all groups signaled as sacred. |  |
| Regardless of a specific culture responsible for any given petroglyph, the Altatl Rock petroghyphs exhibit a strong Numic influence. Indeed, the similarity in subject matter between Altatl Rock and other Numic sites is so strong it precludes the possibility of coincidence, suggesting that we may use Numic ethnography to speculate about the meaning of these petroghyphs more generally. |  |
| Like many other rock art sites, including those of the Numic speakers, the Altatl Rock petroghyphs are dominated by the entoptic patterns common during the initial stage of a vision. A smaller number of other petroglyphs, including bighorn sheep, human figures, footprints, and a horned lizard (the "horned toad"), are also present. |  |
| Particularly notable at the site and the reason for its name is a realistically engraved throwing board or atlatl. Indeed, this is one of the best prehistoric renderings of an atlatl in North America; more typically, atlatl petroghyphs appear to have been schematized as a small circle bisected by a long line. As has been noted previously, atlatls were used as hunting implements to launch small dart-like spears prior to the appearance of the bow and arrow, which occurred at approximately AD 500. |  |
| Although the complete replacement of the atlatl by the bow and arrow may have taken a few centuries to effect, as a general rule of thumb we can consider atlas motifs to be greater than 1,500 years in age. We can infer, then, that at least some of the petroglyphs at Atlatl Rock are 1,500 years old or more, although it is also likely that some of the engravings at this site were made both earlier and more recently. |  |
| The presence of what seem to be relatively large numbers of atlatls and, subsequently, bows and arrows in rock art, along with depiction's of "game," "hunters shooting game," and so on, led many early researchers to hypothesize that the art largely concerned hunting, in general, and perhaps "hunting magic" specifically. We now know that this hypothesis was incorrect: |  |
| Such hunting-theme art is actually relatively rare overall, thus indicating that the hunting magic hypothesis would only explain a small portion of the art any way. The ethnographic record provides us with an alternative understanding of the origin and meaning of the art. In Nevada, for example, hunting-theme art constitutes less than 10 percent o the known petroglyphs. We obtain an inflated perspective of the importance of hunting-theme motifs because our attention is draw to such identifiable designs much more than to the considerable, more common, more elusive, entoptic patterns Hunting weapons like the atlatl, and hunting metaphors like killing a bighorn sheep, were commonly employed in shamanistic rituals and beliefs because, in the Far West, shamanism was largely an adult male activity and the creators of this art were hunters. |   |
| In the historical period, shamans were said to sometimes " receive" through visions bows and arrows as ceremonial objects, and would use them as ritual paraphernalia during curing ceremonies. Similarly, they would occasionally receive the supernatural power in their trances to cure arrow wounds or, subsequently, gunshot wounds as signaled by visions of weaponry and warfare. At this point in time, our best hypothesis is that the earlier creators of the atlatl motifs maintained similar beliefs; thus, it is likely that this motif represents the work of an Atlatl Shaman, an individual who specialized in the treatment of spear wounds. |
| (1) This information was taken from “A Guide to Rock Art Sites of Southern California and Southern Nevada” by David S. Whitely.
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_________ Reference Materials:
Manuscript written by Kenneth C. Clarke
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Billie Mine - Death Valley National Park
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This page last updated on 02097/2018
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| Directions: From the Stratosphere Casino head southwest on S Las Vegas Blvd toward W Baltimore Ave. Travel 1.7 miles and turn right onto Spring Mountain Rd. Go .7 miles and turn left to merge onto I-15 South. Follow for 5.4 miles and take exit 33 to merge onto NV-160 W/Blue Diamond Rd/State Route 160 W toward Pahrump. Continue to follow NV-160 W/State Route 160 West for 55 miles In Pahrump, continue straight on Hwy. 160 through three stoplights then drive 3.1 miles. Turn left at Bell Vista Road and continue 25.5 miles to Death Valley Junction. Turn right and then immediately left on CA Hwy 190 and drive 26 miles and turn left onto Furnace Creek Wash Road. The Billie Mine is about 2.4 miles on the left. | |||
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| 02/28/2014 Trip Notes: Though we drove by these areas on today's visit to the park, rain discourage us from doing and hiking and further exploration of the area. 01/27/2014 Trip Notes: While driving up Furnace Creek Wash Road to Dante’s View I stopped along the side of the road to take a few pictures of the Billie Borax Mine (Figs. 01 & 02). At the time we had no idea that we were looking at one of the largest Borax mines at Death Valley. Currently, I’m planning another trip here at the end of February. | |||
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| The Billie Mine: This site is located in the center of the main borate mining district of Death Valley, just outside of the boundary for Death Valley National Park (Fig. 02). The actual national park boundary runs through the wash along the east side of the road here, making both the Billie Mine site and the abandoned mining town of Ryan visible in the near distance to the south outside of the national park. Most of the borax minerals mined in Death Valley come from the (Pliocene) formations found at Furnace Creek. Here at the Billie mine, and previously at Ryan, these minerals were mined from shafts within this formation. West of the highway you can see a poor job of reclamation attempted to return the area to a natural condition after the open pit mining that took place here in the 1970’s. Looking beyond the Billie Mine to the Funeral Mountains, one can see a sequence of upper Precambrian to lower Paleozoic strata tilting eastward (Fig. 01). During the years following the closing of the mines at Ryan, there was low borate activity in Death Valley until the Kern County Land Company became interested in borates, and started staking and drilling the Billie Mine claims in 1958. The Billie Mine, an underground borax mine along the road to Dante’s View operated for decades and by 2003 was the only active mining operation left in Death Valley National Park. The Billie Mine's headframe (Fig. 03) and waste dumps, across Furnace Creek Wash, are outside of the national park, but the ore deposit itself is within the park boundary, as much as 700 feet beneath the surface between its main shaft and Dante's View Road. The Billie deposit is much larger than the one that was mined at the nearby Boraxo Mine. With many deep shafts (some over 700 feet) and tunnels more than 1,600 feet long. As already noted, this mining operation actually goes under Furnace Creek Wash Road into the boundaries of Death Valley National Park. Specific minerals mined here included mostly Proberite, Ulexite and Colemanite. One of the main reasons the Billie Mine was allowed to tunnel under the national park at this location was because of the relatively rare form of Ulexite found in these deposits. The origin of these minerals is thought to be from hydrothermal fluids circulating through the Furnace Creek formation. Located about 2 miles north west of Ryan,opposite the Billie Mine is the open pit Boraxo Mine (Fig. 02) began operations during the early 70's. However, the scaring of the landscape (Fig. 04) brought a public outcry that led to greater protections of National Park Areas. Congress passed the Mining in the Parks Act in 1976 which closed Death Valley National Monument to the filing of new mining claims, banned open-pit mining and required the National Park Service to examine the validity of thousands of pre-1976 mining claims. Mining was allowed to resume on a limited basis in 1980 with stricter environmental standards. Mine operators are required to get approval of a Plan of Operations which should mitigate damage to the environment. Even though it was expected to be producing ore well into the twenty-first century, the mine was permanently closed in 2005, making it the last of Death Valley’s mine operations. The property has since been donated to the National Park Service. Plans are to use it for the interpretation of the park's mining history in conjunction with the proposed education center at Ryan. | |||
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Fossil Ridge (North End) (DNWR)
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| 02/13/2014 Trip Notes: It was just another beautiful, sunny, February day in the desert. After a very rough, four mile ride up Mormon Well Road (Fig. 01), we turned east onto Gass Peak Road. About a quarter of a mile in there is a small fenced off parking area on the left side of the road. Using this as a trailhead, we headed due east (Fig. 02) out across the desert in the direction of Fossil Ridge. After a little over a half mile, past a series of hills, we ended up on the top our third saddle. Having gained approximately 200 feet in elevation, this saddle provided some nice views. The view in (Fig. 03) is looking due west, back towards our starting point. The snow topped mountain in the very center of the distant mountain range is Mummy Mountain. Turning to the right and looking due north, we were able to see the southern end of the Sheep Range (Fig. 04), with Yucca Peak just to the right of center. Turning completely around and looking slightly Northeast (Fig. 05) was the northern end of Fossil Ridge. Our goal, still more than a mile away, was the top of the ridge, just out of view in the top right of picture. Unfortunately, after another half mile, and climbing another two hundred feet up (Fig. 06), with the goal in sight, we ran out of time and had to abandon our quest of reaching the top. See the arrow in (Fig. 05). The views from this higher elevation were very nice. (Figs. 07 & 08) are looking back over the hills, saddles and washes we had to climb in order to reach this point. After a leisurely hike back to the van (Fig. 09), we drove back down to Corn Creek for lunch and spent a little time wandering around the new visitor center (Fig. 10) and walking a few of the trails. Click here for pictures of Corn Creek … Corn Creek Station - Trip Notes for 02/13/2014. | ||
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| (Fig. 09) Rest Break |
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