Unanswered Curiosities and Loose Ends

God rays over Ozena Valley, taken from Hwy 33.

Burn a tank of gas, do some off-trail, take a bunch of pictures. I spent much of the morning exploring some canyon country near New Cuyama. There is a pictograph site in the area and I stopped by to get some pictures before exploring up a near by rocky and cave riddled branch canyon. Found some odd stuff.

After that I drove east to Lockwood Valley and looked up another small pictograph site in the vicinity. I'm taking the lazy way out here and going with pictures and captions.

Outside New Cuyama I found three weird, but obviously man-made holes.  Only one of them was large enough to be able to squeeze inside. 

I found this to be very mysterious. That door is solid, pasted to the rock with JB Weld which is nearly impossible to remove. The door is about 20"x20" and presumably there's some kind of recess behind it. There's a guy I could ask (he owns the land and we've talked before) but I don't really think I was supposed to run across this. 

This is the largest and deepest of the man-made caves I found. It only goes in about 12 feet.

I mentioned some pictographs being in the neighborhood and these are they. This is a small and pretty degraded site. Paintings are found in multiple huecos. A very small cave has both paintings and cupules.

This was my favorite image from this first of two pictograph sites for the day.

In the same general neighborhood as the rock art I came across this cool little cave. Note the "1983" carved on the right side of the entry. This site was at least 0.5 miles off-trail, totally in the sticks. There's a story there that I'll probably never know the particulars of.

A badlands ridge, taken from Lockwood Valley Rd.

Mt Pinos from Dome Springs.

This neat pictograph comes from the second rock art site of the day. He's commonly  referred to as "Quail Man" because of his jaunty forward facing top feather. 

Quail Man and El Sol

I thought this was a pretty panel of rock.