MYSTICAL MESSAGES THRU TIME?

AMERICAN CAVE PAINTINGS

ON THE CARRIZO PLAIN

      Extraordinary occurrences have taken place here in Painted Rock on the exotic Carrizo plain in San Luis Obispo County. Some look at this formation and see lizards or turtles.

          Pictographs, like the frame above fill the inner chamber of what is a sacred site for Chumash and Yokut Indians.

      The Carrizo Plain is a ten mile wide and almost 50 mile long valley in the eastern portion of San Luis Obispo County between the Temblor and Caliente mountain ranges.  In the 
middle of the northern plain lays Soda Lake, the remains of a prehistoric sea.

      In the rare rainy season the lake becomes 3000 acres of water and a winter home for Sandhill Cranes, but most of the year it is a salt bed.
      Nestled on the western edge of plain is Painted Rock, a curved bowl, not unlike an amphitheater. It is a religious site.  

      It is inside the Painted Rock that shamans and holy men 
of Chumash and Yokut people and perhaps other tribes, have held rituals and left traces of visions.

      The walls are rich with pictographs that are some of the most valuable and rare native paintings in the world.  These
are said to have been made 500 to 2000 years ago.

      The red pigments were made with ochre, the white by shale and gypsum and the black by charcoal.

      Look carefully and you see layers of history and earlier ages speaking through time. 

     Earlier visitors desecrated the ancient paintings, so now
the Painted Rock is open only by appointment.

   

      Imagine the time when a native shaman conducted sacred ritual or activity amidst these stones that were said to resemble specific shapes or powers.

    Ancient California history is visible on the Carrizo Plain national monument, just 90 minutes from Cambria.

     See you down the trail.

WHERE MACHINES ARE NOT ENOUGH

NATURE RULES

     California is dotted with a network of machines out of time.  Equipment, sophisticated, rugged and played out. Once used to tame or cultivate the wild west, they languish now. Powerful they may have been but in the context of the nature they tried to civilize, they are like discarded kid's toys surrounded by a timeless vastness.

      The Carrizo Plain is such a place. Dry land grain farming and ranching was tried in the 1800's.  In 1912 they tried large scale mechanized farming.
     The fifty mile plain is bounded by the Temblor Mountains on the northeast and the Caliente Mountains on the southwest. The San Andreas fault snakes through the plain.
     One of the sunniest places in California, temperatures are often above 100 but skid below freezing on winter nights.
      It is desert dry and agriculture is a struggle.

      These shots are a kind of battle record.  When a farmer named Goodwin gave up the struggle in the 1940's he left his farm and implements to a conservancy with the stipulation they be left facing their work until they are claimed by the ages.  
     These are the skeletons of a hard fight.  In their decline
they create a marvelous art.  In these shots are a context,
a sense of place and time and a look at once marvelous and new technology.
     As always, the land will play the last hand.

See you down the trail.