April 27, 2017 Gold Butte, Nevada

We hiked the Falling Man Trail today. It is a trail to a number of petroglyph panels.

We had hiking directions from the internet with pictures and GPS points. John set the GPS points in his GPS, but they did not match the spots on the real earth.  At each point John reset them. In the second photo there is a tunnel behind John and there is a petroglyph of a corn stalk over his head. It is a good thing I brought the directions and photos or we never would have found all these places. It was like a circuitous treasure hunt finding the glyphs.

John on the other side of the tunnel. The petroglyph on this side of the tunnel  looks like me with my hair standing on end, the Falling Man that the trail is named after. It is by itself on a cliff face, the lower left in the bottom of it is a pictograph of a red cross, hard to see because there is so much other color on the face and some cliff color. The colors here are really brilliant reds, yellows, oranges and purples. The place looks air brushed. The color comes from the presence  or absence of iron oxide.

John photographing the red pictograph.  Round petroglyph, cliff colors and sheep glyphs.

On this face the black layer has sheep at both ends. Yucca blossom.

In the lower photo the water runs from the lower left to the upper right in the wash. As the water wore down the rock it went through different layers of color. The holes in the rock will hold water long after the rainstorm is gone and are called tinajas. These two are dry, but in the upper photo, which is the lowest tinaja has water in it. More colors and glyphs.

This jeep and heavy duty trailer are a sweet rig for the desert. John reading newspaper rock.

Glyphs and colors. John in the colored little grotto we had lunch in.

Colored rocks. This panel is on a rock that fell from under the cliff. The bottom photo is big foot or hang ten glyph that this panel is named after. The foot has the toes wrapped around the edge of the rock like a surfer would on his board.

Sun glyph, round colors and line colors. Back at camp we had cocktails and dinner and watched the colors change on the rock as the sun set.

Chollas backlit at sunset. 

Older glyphs. They are carved in the back desert ‘varnish’ crust  on the rocks. The varnish takes about 3000 years to form and it is reforming in these glyphs so they are older than 3000 years. Sunset behind a mojave yucca.

Sliver moon.