Ancient deeply-carved stone with double circles and a mortar lies fallen and half-buried in Yocum Valley. This marks a place with a few other old carvings and dozens of bedrock
mortars and metates. Below, a nearby boulder with deep carvings and notchings.Lichen-covered and in shadow, this deeply carved boulder holds a complex of interconnected circles. Swartz in 1960 used aluminum powder to enable a photo for a study published in American Antiquity in 1963. Later he conceded using aluminum powder is not recommended due to possible damage. 
The Lorings in their Yocum Valley site entry provided a 1970 sketch that may have been based on Swartz's study.
Photo below shows a detail the bumpy surface and notching of the boulder.A resource-rich wetland on the border of Oregon and
NE California, the wide Yocum Valley is the headwaters of Willow Creek which
becomes Lost River near Clear Lake. Lost River, ancestral home of the
Modocs, weaves its way to the terminal Tule Lake. Photos by Douglas Beauchamp from three visits over several years, most recently May 2026.
Below, boulder with a grinding mortar sits in the open wetland valley.
CODA
We are here to become water again,
to dissolve in circles, trillions of unique grails,
on our way back through past lives,
back to algae, froth rot,
the foam of our ancestral future,
the ancient return.
— Carrie Ivy, from her poem QUEEN OF CUPS
