A winter ascent of a remote, seldom visited Nevada mtn. Let's see if this road will get us up this canyon a ways. Nobody used this road for many a year- we'll just start from here. Sounds like your totally typical desert rat trip. My compadres and I set out through the sage and pinyon pine up a dead end canyon which quickly bounce us off into another drainage. We could see squalls enveloping the nearby White Mountains. The range we were now in had recently gained some prominence in my mind as I had mistaken it for the White Mountains (the highest range entirely within the Great Basin) on another hike. I thought I was totally whacked, but on yet another hike a friend of mine- a longtime Bishop resident who is a most knowledgeable desert rat- also mistook this range for the White Mountains. This mountain range deserved a visit.
My redemption was short lived, as after we negotiated a small narrows and scrambled up over a dry fall, we noticed that we were quite a ways further away from the high point of the range than planned. In my haste to get hiking, I'd driven us up the wrong canyon. No worries, we'll just hike up this steep sided peak and check out the view from there. On the way we saw that nearly the whole mountain range had been logged as there were old stumps almost everywhere in this area. The mining booms of yesteryear had required a lot of energy with no power grid to hook into nearby. The pinyon and juniper had come back pretty well and the range now has a wild remote feel to it (same as most of Nirvada outside of Reno and Lost Wages). Scrambling up some steep loose talus we reached our summit.
The top gave us a pretty darn nice view in three directions and revealed a picturesque area of white tuff spires. At the foot of the white tuff was a large overhang which looked to be an ideal candidate for a rock art site. One of my friends pointed out that white tuff is very soft and was an unlikely spot to find rock art. Another friend (an ex-girlfriend who had sometimes resented being dragged around just to search for rock art sites- but who still fancied guessing where rock art sites were) agreed with me that this overhang looked to be an ideal candidate for a site and that a buttress next to the cave was also a likely candidate. Descending the hill it began to snow blizzard like and my friends started heading down the canyon to get out of the cold wind and snow. I said I'd run up to the overhang and check it out and catch up with them somewhere down the canyon.
Lo and behold, there were petroglyphs at the cave and on the buttress. The petroglyphs were all vulva symbols, either a circle with a vertical line or a boss relief realistic depiction. McLane and Woody had presented a paper at the La Junta ARARA conference detailing this kind of site, observing the frequent depiction of vulva symbols at these white tuff sites, and noting their occurrence through central Nevada into eastern CA. A seventy something year old man who had grown up in Bishop had told me that when he was a school kid, local Indian kids would occasionally mischievously show him a drawing of a circle with a vertical line in it and then run off laughing. Here's a sampling of petroglyphs from this kind of white tuff site.
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