Round Trip Distance: 0.25 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 3050 feet
Cellphone: 0 bars
Time: 1 hr.
Trailhead: Inscription Canyon
Fee: none
Attractions: rock art
Inscription Canyon is located in the Black Mountain Rock Art District about 20 miles due north of Hinkley, California. The site includes scores of petroglyphs and a few pictographs that were created on the basalt cliffs and boulders of the small canyon.
We got to the canyon my following the Hinkley Road and a variety of BLM routes over Opal Mountain. It turned out requiring a lot of high clearance 4wd driving. A better route might be to drive north from Barstow toward Copper City and then head west on the Black Canyon Road or taking the Hinkley Road to County Road 20771 and following that around the east side of the Black Mountain area. Cutting across Opal Mountain like we did was, as we said, very rough.
For this post we started with the images on the south side of the canyon.
These reticulated patterns look like baskets.
Some of the better panels on the south side of the canyon have enough lichens growing over them that most of the images are obscured. Thankfully the sun must be too intense for the lichens on the opposite side of the canyon where there is less of this effect.
The light side and the lichen dark side.
The petroglyphs on the north side of the wash are more dense showing up on most every smooth cliff surface as well as many of the smaller rocks and boulders sticking up out of the ground.
Red paint was used in places. Mostly as boxes or borders around other images.
It's interesting how much geometry was used to express the intended meaning behind the images. Two of the images in this photo look like they might be faces or masks.
Various circles.
An Easter basket.
Here is a nice anthropomorphic image. We didn't notice many of these. Some of the rectangular images might be limbless anthropomorphs.
A couple of sheep with some red paint.
The bottom looks like a mouth.
Maybe a medicine wheel.
Whatever it is it looks like a barrel cactus.
There are more panels of petroglyphs along the road on the outside of the fenced area of the wash. There are two large rectangular bodied sheep in this photo with decorated bodies that are interesting.
There are probably at least a score or two more images that we could show if it weren't for making this post too long. The following slideshow was about a half hour long before we deleted a few hundred of the images. Inscription Canyon is well off the beaten path but it is well worth the trouble to visit. If you would like to see it for yourself then all you have to do is 'Take a hike'.
