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

What Lizard Forgot

You look ahead, up ahead is fate. 

—Anzhelina Polonskaya

 

Lizard does recall!  The Great Remembering. The Vast Cycles.

“… global warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end … faces as much as 3.1C (5.6F) of warming … prevent a cascade of dangerous … hottest in recorded … 57.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide … collectively a cut of 42 … 57 percent by 2035 for any hope … 20 largest economies…” —From news agencies per UN October 2024

Time measured in the counting.
The stories they don’t tell.
The brilliant bones.
Scattered shards of light.
 —DB

We suddenly discovered the sun, and we were vouchedsafed white stones and a dusky and wild body. —Anzhelina Polonskaya

Yes, we are envoys of a flat earth, our only vocabulary is antonyms. —Ostap Slyvynsky

Who needs TV drama? This is life in the volcano. This is as cold as it gets. —Meg Kearney

NOTES
—Anzhelina Polonskaya: You look… from the poem Calculator; We suddenly… from the poem Saga, both in A Voice: Selected Poems 2004. (trans from Russian by Andrew Wachtel). Anzhelina Polonskaya lives in Germany; her poems are prohibited in Russia.
—Meg Kearney from the poem Living in the Volcano in her collection Home By Now 2009.
—Kateryna Kalytko and Ostap Slyvynsky excerpts from the anthology In the Hour Of War:  Poetry from Ukraine 2023, tr. by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

PHOTOS Oregon’s Northern Great Basin, October 2024. Click to enlarge

CODA
Who knew? Everyone knew.
Inevitability spreads like nuclear radiation,
breaking down words …
It's easier, now, that the war has started. Easier, after all
now. How clear is our past, with its mistakes of tone,
its sincerity, its
air.
—Kateryna Kalytko

 

Evanescence

Above:   1. Canyon wall, Warner Basin Uplands.  2. Original photo.  3&4. To reveal detail of this very faded rock painting, two enhanced versions (DStretch) with further modifications in Photos editor.

Observations & speculations. The shape of the stone commands attention, evokes a certain power essential to the placement of the painting's figure. Hands or paws may have been painted on this ghost-like figure in a different pigment, now disappeared. Or, perhaps the intent is approximately as we see in the enhanced images. The horizontal strokes may be ribs, or perhaps they represent cut marks. Whether the painting is gendered or sexualized, is a warning or invocation, is a spirit presence, all suggestive yet remain unknown ... in the fading...

 

CODA

The song that sang itself
had no time
knew no season
it sounded with the power of the end
— Suzan Shown Harjo from The Song Called "White Antelope’s Chant”

Blessed
are those who listen
when no one is left to speak.
— Linda Hogan from the poem Blessings

Both poets included in When The Light Of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020), Joy Harjo, editor

Season of their loss

A poem by James Welch

Thanksgiving at Snake Butte

In time we rode that trail
up the Butte, as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top. Antelope scattered

through the rocks before us, clattered
unseen down the easy slope to the west.
Our horses balked, stiff legged,
their nostrils flared at something unseen
gliding smoothly through the brush away.

On top, our horses broke, loped through
a small stand of stunted pine, then jolted
to a nervous walk. Before us lay
the smooth stones our ancestors, the fish,
the lizard, snake and bent-kneed

bowman – – etched by something crude,
by a wandering race, driven by their names
for time: its winds, its rain, its snow
and the cold moon tugging at the crude figures
in this, the season of their loss.  

..........................................................................

Lauren Bridgeman and Maria Zedeno describe Snake Butte as "a sacred landscape, home to powerful traditional snake medicine, religious areas for fasting, environmental resources for collecting, and cultural features that convey the living and remembered traditions of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples."

James Welch (1940-2002) as a child attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations. Snake Butte is located within the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, homeland to the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) Tribes. Welch became famous as a western regional and Native American writer beginning with Winter in the Blood, 1974.  Previously, in 1971, he published his only collection of poetry: Riding the Earthboy 40, which includes the poem Thanksgiving at Snake Butte. 

Upon reflection we consider again (and again) the answer to our time. An echo in the season of loss.  We may recall how the some of the rock mass of Snake Butte was mined in the 1930s for the massive Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River.  A tangible loss also fractures spirit.  This continues at full thrust on and in many sacred lands and places.  Where will wisdom sit?

The neocapitalist crush and craze for all things that can be extracted -- Lithium, for example -- continues unabated. Thacker Pass, a sacred landscape on federal lands in northern Nevada near the Oregon border, is on the brink of devastation. 

To follow the evolving situation at Thacker Pass, in the McDermitt Caldera lapping into Oregon, check these links and sources:  — Protect Thacker Pass https://www.protectthackerpass.org/blog/
On December 5th, 2023, In Reno NV, following a federal judge’s dismissal of their latest lawsuit, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony (RSIC) will hold a press conference on their court cases against the Thacker Pass lithium mine.
— Judge again rules against tribes’ effort to stop lithium mine
November 21, 2023  https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/11/21/judge-again-rules-against-tribes-effort-to-stop-lithium-mine/
— Previously on RockArtOregon
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/03/center-of-earth.html
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/06/center-of-earth-2.html

Placing Stone

This was only a theory and yet
what is a stone but a theory of change?
 — Paul Hoover

 

the stone itself in the seeing
the seen of the self revealing
gravitas congealing earth’s fire

enfolding residual continuity
a motionless shimmer
lean summer grasses shiver

do we need to think this say this
as the stone stands forth
as with every thing a theory

Photos: Warner Basin, Southeastern Oregon. A day's indeterminate walk, sagelands. The pictures appear determinate. Then we remember:  the light and angle of another day shift ... lichen moss mineral, the very weight of stone, the revelation of relations... the way.

...
Purpose is silent, as ever, patient in folds of time.
… What I've learned has been added to me — superstition and dream as sure as numbers. 

— Killarney Clary, from the poem “An Unlikely One Will Guide Me…"

Big Island Hawaii

As Mauna Loa opens rifts and flows molten lava, and with a bow to Pele, petroglyphs from the Ka'u district, near South Point, Big Island

Ancient figures near grinding slick

 Papamū, a stone board for the game kōnane; located in shelter protected by a bouldered wall

Above, petroglyph figure facing the sea; detail below, note small head and waving? hands

Appearance as power figure.

Above, two figures looking to the sea; detail below.

This style more recent than the rectilinear-style figures; style may determine a general chronology.

NOTES
— Ka’u, Big Island Hawaii, 2009, photos and notes, Douglas Beauchamp
— Recommended:  Spirit of Place: Petroglyphs of Hawai'i (1999) by Georgia Lee and Edward Stasack
 

Addendum:  Configuration of Stone
Configuration a word. Description founded on a quest for understanding. As all words.
Stone an image of stone, an appearance of fundament beyond language.
Configuration as word seeks to grasp appearance beyond the boundaries of duration.
 

Consider figures in place. Consider a stone game board played with white shells smoothed by the sea.
 

Consider variations on “Configuration” per Wiktionary:
— Form, as depending on the relative disposition of the parts of a thing's shape; figure; form factor.
— Relative position or aspect of the planets; the face of the horoscope, according to the relative positions of the planets at any time.
— The way things are arranged or put together in order to achieve a result.
— The arrangement of electrons in an atom, molecule, or other physical structure like a crystal.
— A finite set of points and lines (and sometimes planes), generally with equal numbers of points per line and equal numbers of lines per point.

Contingencies of Stone

Peoples moving through country 

placing stones in angular embrace

constellating vague terrain

mineral clouds congeal silence

molten oxides spark red patina 

flaming brown starkly russet

each stone accidentally 

atomic star-light dusted 

lichen brushed… hushed… 

shaped shadows drifting

ghosts eluding gravity 

… no more messages

A Matter of Experience

These placed stones, near Dry River, the terrain of the central Oregon lavalands, are among uncountable thousands encountered over many years of wandering around sagelands — SE Oregon, Central Oregon, NE California, NW Nevada.  Placed stones as I use the term is one species in the complex descriptive genus referred to as rock features, for example:  rock cairns, rock piles, stone circles, ring sites, ambush drive walls, kill or traps sites, “vision quest” structures, “prayer seats,” “medicine wheels,” cache pits, rock art sites.  Yet, nothing is as it appears…

Consider: World Observation

“In the first place, an observer observing herself in the act of the world observation will quickly realize that the results of her observation (her respective experiences) will depend on the different points of view accessible to her, and as there are always exists a potential infinity of such points of view, it follows that there will also be a potential infinity of representations (experiences) for each object of reference."

— Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, from Three Notes on Contingency Today (2022)