Round Trip Distance: 2.2 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Elevation: 3833 - 4045 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 3 hrs. 30 mins.
Trailhead: 35.03460, -115.37186
Turnoff: 35.03127, -115.38806
Fee: none
Attractions: petroglyphs
The Black Canyon Wash Petroglyphs are located west of Needles, California in the Mojave National Preserve. The relatively easy site to reach boasts a score or more panels of petroglyphs along a 700 feet stretch of low cliffs.
The turnoff to the trailhead is 3/4 of a mile south of the Hole in the Wall Information Center on the paved Black Canyon Road. For turn-by-turn directions to the turnoff enter 35.03127, -115.38806 into your driving app. From there it is only 1.7 miles on a pretty good 4WD road to the trailhead which is at the boundary of the Mojave Wilderness Area. If your driving app knows about this 4WD road you might be able to use the coordinates for the trailhead (35.03460, -115.37186) instead. Our Toyota driving app knows about the road but Google Maps on Android doesn't.
From the wilderness boundary the 4WD road that used to continue all the way to the wash has been almost completely reclaimed by nature making it pretty much impossible to follow. We could have included that route in our GPS track but it goes rather far afield where it reaches the wash. The best thing is to make your way from the trailhead directly over to Black Canyon Wash and follow it to the site. The wash is firm enough for hiking but there are also trails up on the bank that you can hike maybe a little faster.
Going that route will bring you to each of the petroglyph sites in the order that we labeled them on the map. You might notice that while the petroglyphs are all along Black Canyon Wash they are also at the mouth of Grass Canyon. For that reason you might also see them referred to as the Grass Canyon Petroglyphs.
The first site is a rocky point that is a little bit above the wash.
There are more than a half dozen panels at this first site that we labeled P1.
Most everything are geometrical images.
We're guessing that probably dates them all the way back to the Archaic Period of 1,000 B.C.E. or earlier.
Occasionally there will be an image of an animal, like in this photo, but there aren't very many of them.
The next group of panels that we listed as P3 includes several of what I'll refer to descriptively as star fields.
Here are some mixed in with a few other shapes.
There are several segmented rectangles in this area also. This one has two hand images below it.
At the area that we labeled P4 we scaled up a precarious slope to take some photos. Once we got up there we noticed that if we would have walked around the corner we would have found an easy place that we could have walked up.
P4 is another area with quite a few individual panels of images.
At the Main Panels area the petroglyphs are starting to look like wallpaper there are so many.
These are some really imaginative looking images!
Many of these images are high up in places only accessible to rock climbers. We were using a 100-400 mm zoom lens to get our photos.
One image that gets repeated quite a bit is the concentric crosses. Sometimes they are referring to Venus the Morning/Evening star though that might not be the case in this instance.
On our visit to Black Canyon Wash we took hundreds and hundreds of photos. Only a handful of them are shown in this post but more can be seen in the really long slideshow that follows.If you would like to see the site for yourself all you have to do is 'Take a hike'.
