Yocum Valley: Ancient Carved Stone

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

Inyo Rising

The narrating voices that, entwined or in juxtaposition, tell us about the universe are only two. Light and gravity. In the story that emerges, the invisible holds sway. What we can observe is simply an exception.
—Ersilia Vaudo

 

But man cannot master this lesson, 
the lesson of stone: 
he tumbles, his body crumbles, 
his word and voice unravel.

Fire, water and tree 
steal themselves:
dying, they seek a mineral body 
and find the road to glory: 
steady, the stone shines 
like a hard new rose.
—Pablo Neruda  

I want the light 
locked inside to awaken:
crystalline flower,
wake as I do:

eyelids raise the curtain 
of endless earthen time 
until deeply buried eyes 
flash clear enough again 
to see their own clarity.
—Pablo Neruda

NOTES
—Top photo, to honor Earth Day:  Earthrising beyond Moon, from Artemis II, NASA, March 2026

—Photos: Petroglyphs on a rock wall, Owens Valley, Inyo County CA, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp
—Ersilia Vaudo (Astrophysicist with  the European Space Agency), from The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions (2025, trans from Italian by Vanessa Di Stefano)
—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973, Nobel 1971), from Stones of the Sky.
1970/Spanish, 1987/English trans by James Nolan, Copper Canyon Press

Time, Opaque

And so the days go by here, without incident.
    Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time’s huge, opaque mass. 
    —Han Kang

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations," Mary Austin wrote, "deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars ... wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.” ...

 ... To be like the lean coyote is a comfort beneath a sky that is full of fog or full of sunlight and either way impenetrable. Such comfort is not a reason for carelessness. Precisely because you might not know everything — because the night answers but not with words you can understand, and the stars swing above you, moving, as Austin tells us, as if "on some stately service not needful to declare,“ you must accept certain responsibilities — among them the task of taking care.
    —Kendra Atleework

 Click photo, zoom in for detail

What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may? In the darkest night, there is language that asks what we are made of, that insists on imagining into the first person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabit this planet; language that connects us to one another. 

 

Literature that deals in this language inevitably holds a kind of body heat. Just as inevitably, the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life. I would like to share the meaning of this award, which is for literature, with you – standing here in opposition to violence together. 
    —Han Kang from her Nobel Prize speech (December 2024, translated from Korean by Maya West)

NOTES
—Han Kang, top: Greek Lessons: A Novel (2023). Han Kang awarded the Nobel in Literature, 2024
—Kendra Atleework, Miracle Country: A Memoir (2020)
—Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)
Both write of the country east of the Sierras, the Owens Valley, Inyo County, California
—Photos:  Inyo County, California, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

 

Two Boulders, Seeming So

It is possible that to seem—it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.

The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night 

Or sleep.

— Wallace Stevens

ABOVE: An old-style boulder moved from the edge of the lower Columbia River, as Bonneville Dam was constructed, to a plaza in front of the county courthouse at Stevenson WA.  

So it seems:  The Garrison Eddy Petroglyph Boulder

...

There might be, too, a change immenser than
A poet’s metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where
Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content,
In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

That we do not need to understand, complete
Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.

—Wallace Stevens

...

BELOW:  Near a road winding east in Mendocino County to the Elk River, with over a dozen concentric circles carved in bas relief, this boulder considered an example of the some of the oldest rock art in the Northwest.

So it seems:  The Spyrock Petroglyph Boulder

Hundreds of miles apart, these two boulders bearing carvings which appear to be related traditions. I speculate early peoples traveled along the coast and explored up rivers. Perhaps settling, or moving on, maybe disappearing. But in these attentive instances, they left their marks.

These concentric circular motifs seem to speak of water.  Perhaps of cycles, of seasons, in memory. A bringing forth from and with stone. As invocation. We cannot know.

All photos: Douglas Beauchamp

In flat appearance we should be and be, 

Except for delicate clinkings not explained.

These are the actual seemings that we see,
Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so.

—Wallace Stevens

(All Stevens excerpts from the poem Description Without Place)

It is a sense

To which we refer experience, a knowledge
Incognito, the column in the desert,

On which the dove alights. Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.

It is an expectation, a desire,
A palm that rises up beyond the sea,

A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see

And our memorials of that difference,
Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.

The future is description without place,
The categorical predicate, the arc.

—Wallace Stevens

Flowering Earth

Flowering Earth or Emergency Earth: Resetting Normal

"The extreme temperatures of 2023, 2024 and 2025 will be seen as cooler than average in just a few years.  Continued fossil-fuel emissions are rapidly resetting what the world considers normal."

—Samantha Burgess, European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service

“That’s the big difference between where we thought the world would be in 2015, and where we are now.”  —Samantha Burgess

‘New Climate Reports Show ‘Unprecedented Run of Global Heat’

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13012026/multiple-reports-show-2025-extreme-global-heat/

Flowering Earth, figuring Sky, forgiving Seasons: this boulder is part of a complex of rocks, petroglyphs, and alignments at a place of passage.

Chewaucan basin, Lake County, Oregon. Photos Douglas Beauchamp

Morning light throws deep carving of Earth Flower in relief.

TUFA

Tufas, like mineral flowers, emerge, protrude, and fragment as a lake recedes.  Bud, blossom, seed, left high and dry.  Tufas congeal in crenate patterns, constellated, crystallized, caverned, calcified froth. 

This tufa boulder formed under the waters of a bay of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan in northwest Nevada.  An immersed spring emits dissolved calcium which combines with carbon in the lake water to form calcium carbonate into a sort of crystalline structure, which is then eroded. These deeply carved petroglyphs, vulva-like shapes and linear incisings, are undated.

The petroglyphs on this boulder appear as emblems of desire, as invocations, perhaps entreating sexual fecundity, necessary replenishment. In these landscapes as marvelous, saturated dream-space, I am reminded of Max Ernst’s frottages and textured paintings.  

The boulders' location is proximate to the justly famous, oldest dated petroglyphs in North America, also carved on tufa. Those dated petroglyphs look to the east over Winnemucca Dry Lake, east of Pyramid Lake - both remnant lakes of pluvial Lake Lahontan. The Winnemucca petroglyphs were determined by Larry Benson and associates in 2013 to date to at least 10,500 years ago.

 

Another carved tufa boulder near the spring.

A very hot spring, once at the bottom of a pluvial (Pleistocene) lake, located on the playa near the tufa boulders.

CODA
We all belong not just to our present moment, nor to the place in which we find ourselves at that moment, but to a far greater system of changes which have occurred throughout Earth's history and will continue to occur long into the future. The present convulsions of the planet are the result of the whole Earth system trying, in response to terrible pressures, to shift itself, often violently, into a new set of alignments, and we are part of those changes. We are the weather, and the water; we are the lionfish, too, changing our environment as we are changed by it. This realization can be humbling. and it can be hopeful too. We belong to the whole timescale of history. —James Bridle, from Here Come The Lionfish,  Emergence Magazine, Vol. 5: Time (2024)

Below: Max Ernst: The Gray Forest (1927)