Round Trip Distance: 0.25 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 5101 - 5200 feet
Cellphone: 3-5 bars
Time: 1 hr.
Trailhead: 36.97688, -112.46834
Fee: none
Attractions: petroglyphs, pictographs
The Clam Shell Site is located just east of Fredonia, Arizona. The site gets its name from an overhang with a large slab of rock in its opening that from below resembles a clam shell. The large slab of rock is covered with petroglyphs. A few pictographs can be found within the overhang.
The easiest way to get there, is to enter the coordinates 36.97688, -112.46834 into you driving app. It should have you follow the Woods Loop Road for 3.75 miles. The Woods Loop Road is normally suitable for highway type 2WD vehicles.
The Clam Shell is just above Picnic Site #3. For a good route up over that first ledge of cliff keep driving past the picnic site for another hundred feet or so.
At that point there is an easy route where the cliff is much lower.
There is actually a cairned route that leads back around above the picnic site to the Clam Shell. When we were there it didn't look like anyone had used the trail in years.
The slab of rock with the petroglyphs is positioned on a slant which makes it a little harder to take photos.
Here's a nice big foot with 6 toes.
There are concentric circles and spiral positioned in several places beneath the overhang that were probably solstice markers.
Here is a spiral on the edge of a boulder. It looks like this rock was once one big slab and that the ground beneath it eroded away causing it to sag and break into multiple pieces. That may have happened after this image was first created meaning that if it was a solstice marker that it is no longer in the same position to function as one now.
Mixed in with all of the images on the large slab of rock are these 3 cupules.
A white pictograph of an anthropomorphic figure.
Next to it is a petroglyph of an anthropomorphic figure.
Here is a figure with a fan like headdress.
There are a lot more images here that its hard to imagine what they might represent. Some of them look like sharpening grooves and some look like sharpening grooves meant to form an image of something.
This figure is on the overhang. There is also a red pictograph but there is no telling what it may have been.
