Granite Wash Petroglyphs

I was playing around on www.flicker.com and found photos by an interesting person who was driving around the South West developing mapping software. His photos are unique in that you can click a link and you'll see a map and coordinates of where the picture was taken. It sounds like a very cool feature for folks that want to include locations with their photos, and I'm sure it has many more applications that I can't even imagine.

I've been doing something similar (but on an elementary level) for some time now. It was killing me to write down coordinates everytime I took a picture, and taking a picture of the GPS screen after photographing a glyph wasn't exactly efficient either. So I thought to myself how cool it would be if I had a GPS that would record my location at various intervals. It was quite a task. Salespeople these days can do little more than read the side of the box to you when you want to know about an item's features. And the feature I was looking for just didn't seem that popular. I went through several high end GPS models before I found what I was looking for. I finally settled on a Garmin GPSmap 60C. This model allows you to record tracks based on time or distance intervals. So what I did was turn on the GPS and let it find the satellites to establish location and time. I imagine the GPS satellites are synchronized with a super-duper-accurate-atomic-clock or something. I then synchronize by computer's time to that of the GPS via a USB cable, then I would synchronize my camera's clock to my computer. It seems like the long way to do something, but now my camera and GPS are synchronized. Then I set my GPS to record my location every 30 seconds or so and turn it on at the beginning of a hike. Later I go home and download the recorded positions and photos onto my computer. Then if I ever want to know where a picture was taken, I can take the date and time from the pic, and compare it to the list of locations, and see the coordinates of where I took it.

There's software out there that will take all that info, and superimpose the coordinates on the picture for you, but it sells for something like two hundred bucks! No way! It's funny how I'll pay $450 for the GPS I want, $600 for the camera I want, but won't part with $200 to make my life a little easier!

I showed this neat little trick to some of the mouth-breathers at the AAS Rock Art Recording School. Some oooh-ed and awww-ed, some were indifferent, and others called me a heretic and threatened to burn me at the stake lest I steal their soul with my wizardry. I think it's important to point out that some of these folks were still wanting to record glyphs the old way, by photographing them on 35mm black and white film. I'm having less and less to do with the AAS these days in case you haven't guessed.

Cave Creek

This is the cave at Cave Creek. Inside are petroglyphs, pictographs, and a firepit. The guide told us plenty of history about the cave, including a controversial massacre that took place there. Controversial massacre? Is there any other kind?
The cave is on private property owned by a trust organized to protect it. Once a month, six months out of the year, volunteers take groups of up to 30 people to see the cave. So I feel kinda special because there are very few people that have actually seen the cave at Cave Creek.
The trust I mentioned has a website of course. Here it is...
http://www.dflt.org/index.htm

Hayden Butte

I hiked up Hayden Butte in Tempe today to see the glyphs. It was a good little hike, nothing strenuous, just enough to get the blood pumping. The view from the top was nice and you could see a great view of the Tempe Town Lake.
Plenty of glyphs, mostly abstracts. But there were a few anthromorphs and quadripeds. I had to go off the trail past the signs that said "Please Stay on the Trail" to get most of the good pics. I believe in good natured tresspassing, and I'm not afraid to hop a rail or climb a fence. In fact, if it weren't for a couple of good natured tresspassers, we wouldn't have those fantastic Kartchner Caverns down by Benson.

Here's an interesting pair. They look identical and stand side by side, they may be twins. Hero or Warrior Twins figure heavily in South West and Meso American mythologies. The Navajo call them Monster Slayer and Born for Water. In the Mayan Popol Vuh, twins grow and defeat the gods of the Underworld.
These figures might represent them, they might not. But it's fun to speculate, to put yourself high on that hill a thousand years ago, and try to get into the mind of the person who etched these figures.