Picture Rock Pass: Angle of Suppose

I do not want 3D glasses, friend, it’s already 3D.

Look up look out.   Out—what is that.

—Jorie Graham, from The Enmeshments in Fast (2017).

Summer Lake basin, northern terminus viewed from Winter Rim.

Center:  Ana Springs reservoir, part of the extensive state-owned Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge which, diked and channeled, manages water from Ana Springs overflow. A containment.

Green circle: Alfalfa, often shipped to the far east as animal feed, two, three cuts a year.

Far left:  Klippel Point, a block-lift escarpment, the east-west Carlon Road disappearing toward distant Diablo Mountain.   

Fire July 2017 scorched northern Winter Rim, charred logs blazing in sunrise, portending a heating landscape.  Thousands of acres of old Juniper trees clearcut in the northern Great Basin, an un-native devastated terrain intended to hasten water run-off.  Sometimes a controlled burn follows. In testimony: a stump near Picture Rock Pass.  

 

The well-known Picture Rock Pass petroglyph, near Highway 31.

The definitive Oregon Geographic Names, 6th edition, 1992, strangely states: “Picture Rock Pass  … The name comes from some strange designs or pictures on the rock about a hundred feet south of the highway.  These peculiar marks, made by Indians, are strongly suggestive of a WPA style painting project operated by the aborigines.”  The most-recent volume, 7th edition, 2003, revised to simply:  “The name comes from some designs or pictures on the rocks about a hundred feet south of the highway.”

A placed rock near an abandoned Native American village site.

Marker, prayer, respect.

A petroglyph Luther Cressman did not see, but from a photograph in the 1930s he called it a horse design. (Site 26, Petroglyphs of Oregon 1937). Maybe. This picture, an imagined being, a representation, an unknown, moving on... in place, through time.

North of the Pass below Egli Rim an abandoned spring fenced in by settlers, by travelers through the pass between Silver Lake and Summer Lake.  Back when, water piped, channeled to fire-hollowed logs for stock watering. A containment.

Walking sandy ground, downslope, a few petroglyphs one local named in a self-published booklet purchased years ago at Summer Lake store: The Medicine Man Trail.

Look up look out. Another angle of suppose.

Lake County Oregon August-September 2020.  Photos Douglas Beauchamp