Auf Wiedersehen Part 2

January 1-2, 2022
Part 2 of a rock art road trip, spending eight days and seven nights driving 1,870 miles through Utah, Nevada, and California.

Chris and I got a late start on Saturday but our first planned stop wasn’t very far away. We visited the Shooting Gallery petroglyphs in the Pahranagat Range, which was our only hike of the day because we wanted to move on to warmer climes in California and had a lot of driving to do later. Once again I used Google Maps to route and while it wasn’t bad as the last time, the route was much longer than it should have been. We were breaking trail in snow that was several days old, and it briefly led us up the wrong road. About a mile before reaching the parking area we reached a better road that had seen a lot of traffic since the last snowfall, and we’d end up taking that one back to the highway later.

Badger Valley

Wrong turn on a scenic road

The rock art at the Shooting Gallery was a little more spread out than most of the other sites we’d visited and we spent a couple of hours hiking around. I know we missed at least one good petroglyph panel that I’d seen photos of but the stuff we did find was decent.

Shooting Gallery petroglyphs

East Pahranagat Range

Shooting Gallery petroglyphs with red pigment

Shooting Gallery pictographs

Lone sheep petroglyph

Shooting Gallery petroglyphs

Shooting Gallery petroglyphs at ground level

Shooting Gallery petroglyphs

We stopped briefly in Rachel, then again in Tonopah to resupply. We camped in a gravel pit south of town near Klondike and ate fried potatoes and smoked sausage for dinner.

Extraterrestrial Highway sign

Rachel, Nevada

Potatoes and sausage with onions and peppers

After a much earlier start than the previous day we stopped in Goldfield to see the International Car Forest.

Someone might get killed

He survived!

Cowboy silhouette

International Car Forest

Skerw

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Gorilla? Squatch?

Driving the short bus

Nevada

Indecline

After a couple more hours of driving we passed through Bishop, California, and visited three more rock art sites. First up was Red Rock Canyon where hiked about two miles, wandering through the boulders looking for petroglyphs.

Entering California on Highway 266

Red Rock Canyon petroglyphs

Next was the Yellowjacket site, where many of the panels were high on a ridge facing west. I couldn’t help but frame a lot of my photos with those beautiful snow-capped mountains in the background!

Yellowjacket petroglyphs

Lastly we visited the Chalfant petroglyphs. They were quite different from the others in the area, with very large circle motifs and long, slender figures with long ears and noses.

Chalfant petroglyphs

The sun set on us so we started looking for a place to camp. We found a not-so-great site right on the side of a road on a ridge above Fish Slough, but we had cell service and a nice view of the mountain range. For dinner I made a dish that my dad used to make. It was the only thing he knew how to cook (my mom did all the cooking when I was a kid), consisting of ground beef, onions, celery, and a can of pork and beans. It was finally warm enough that I felt like sleeping in my cot that night, the first time of the trip.

White Mountain Peak viewed from camp