Mojave once was a doodle pad

THERE are some nifty pictures to be seen in them thar hills -- once, that is, you’ve risen at the crack of dawn, obtained security clearance, had your car searched, listened to a pep talk from the local police and driven deep into a weapons testing base.

The pictures, or rather petroglyphs, are well worth the inconvenience.

Far inside the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, past 90 minutes of desert scrub and rocks, we saw primitive drawings chipped into rock -- of men hurling spears and shooting arrows; mountain lions leaping; rattlesnakes slithering; and bighorn sheep, bighorn sheep, bighorn sheep, sproinging about on seemingly every surface. Some of the designs, which were pecked into the rock by ancient Native Americans living around the Coso Range, date back a century or so. Others are more than 10,000 years old.

Protected by its military locale, the Renegade Canyon national historic landmark, better known as Petroglyph Canyon, is not only one of the best petroglyph sites in the West, but it’s also one of the best preserved.

On a recent Sunday, a friend and I took a Maturango Museum tour to the site, roaring 160 miles north into the Mojave Desert.

Getting there was part of the fun. With a loaded CD player and rations, Manuel and I barreled out of Los Angeles on a Saturday, taking California 14 past the tract homes of Palmdale and into the wilds beyond.

We saw miles and miles of Joshua trees, scraggly at first then fatter and more imposing as we gained in elevation. We saw tumbleweed, creosote bushes and rusty-red dried flowers. We passed mauve volcanic mountains and red cliffs frilly-edged by erosion.

By late afternoon, the town of Ridgecrest was our oyster. Ridgecrest is not, say guidebooks, a spot in which to linger. But we were content for a night, filling up on beer, chicken tostadas and pork and beef sopes at the basic-but-tasty Astorga’s Mexican Grill, then lounging in our basic-but-comfy Carriage Inn room, sipping wine and channel-surfing.

Rules and more rules

THE alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. I swigged some dank motel coffee, then we stumbled out and got to Ridgecrest’s Maturango Museum, where tours begin, at 6:30 a.m.

We 12 tourists and three guides were grouped in a convoy of five vehicles. At the entrance to the naval base, hoods and trunks were popped and searched, and IDs checked.

We were reminded by a China Lake officer that cameras and binoculars were not to be used until we arrived at the petroglyph site, that vehicles were not to stop for sightseeing on the way there, even if we were to spot a wild horse or pretty cactus. And folks, this was a weapons-testing facility; it would be imprudent to pick up any interesting piece of metal.

As we drove by the China Lake bed, I felt as though I’d been told not to think of pink elephants and thus found it hard to think of much else.

But the petroglyph chatter distracted me. We rode in a van with Pam Maciokas and David Young of Portland, Ore., who had seen petroglyphs in Arizona and Utah. David said he’d been wanting to do this tour for years.

And it was amazing. In the parking lot, waiting for everyone to use the primitive restroom -- the last we’d see for hours -- we easily found obsidian arrowheads, then we dropped them back in the gravel for others to find.

We trudged toward Little Petroglyph Canyon and within minutes reached our first petroglyph: a picture of a man (technically, an anthropomorph) and a round, striped egg design.

“What it means is anyone’s guess,” said our chief tour guide, Mike Garrison, in what was to become a familiar refrain.

Rocks in the Mojave are varnished dark with minerals -- a canvas for anyone with the time, motivation and elbow grease to chip or scratch through, making patterns by exposing the lighter rock below. Except for places where boulders were softly matted with rusty-green lichen, the rocks around us were covered with the primitive etchings -- high, low, at times you almost stepped on them. Clearly, ancestors of the Panamint Shoshone, who live around the Coso Range today, and others thought to have traveled here from as far away as Wyoming had elbow grease in abundance.

We turned into the canyon, and the whole world became a giant doodle pad. Two men shooting bows and arrows at each other -- a clear sign, we were told, that the art was 1,500 years or newer, because bows and arrows weren’t used earlier. A design that looked like a keyhole. Perhaps, said Garrison, a rattlesnake rattle. A great, honking bighorn sheep with two heads. More sheep covered by a fringe of vertical lines that Garrison said symbolized rain.

He added that a principal theory, by Maturango archeology curator Alexander Rogers, was that the sheep drawings were thought to cause rain. Bighorns move to lower ground when it rains to find water, so perhaps the early artists thought the act of drawing sheep would get rain to come.

The canyon walk is about 1 1/4 miles long with a gentle, 300-foot drop and only a few rocky scrambles. You’d think it would be easy going, but the ground was a mixture of rocks and sand, and you always had to look where your feet were landing -- and down, of course, is the last place you wanted to be looking.

You wanted to be staring high up, at that panel covered with people with crisscrossed torsos. Or there, at a line of dancers. Or to the left, at the man launching a spear with an old thrower known as an atlatl, a sign that the image could date back as far as 7,000 years, to when throwers first appeared.

All was still, except when ravens cawed or big brown insects buzzed by. Later, chukars claimed the canyon. Their dung carpeted the ground. Their clucking grew wild as we scrambled down rocks and surprised them.

We saw some modern graffiti -- such as Einstein’s famous E=mc2, carved by some physicist-vandal. More than 50 years old, it’s now protected. Elsewhere, we saw a Model T, a plane shooting a missile and a rock with “PAM” gouged into it.

After a while, you start to see things. I swear I saw a television, a 10 Commandments-like tablet, two kangaroos and a Dalek, that trashcan-shaped robot-like mutant from the British TV show “Dr Who.”

And after five hours of staring at petroglyphs -- I say this sheepishly, because, of course, these are precious artifacts from the distant, unchronicled past -- your head starts to swim.

We rested at the canyon’s end, eating trail mix and gulping water. Then Garrison told us of another, shorter canyon we could see once we got back to the top.

Part of me just wanted to say, “Please, no more petroglyphs, especially no more bighorn sheep.” But nearly all of us went and saw impressions in the rocks used for pounding roots and acorns, a cool snake-like image and the most deeply etched bighorn of them all.

Little Petroglyph Canyon left me wondering for days after my visit why the people who once lived here felt compelled to create the images.

Was it ritualistic or magical? A way to bring rain or good luck to the hunt or record in stone sacred vision quests, as some books theorize? (The site is still sacred to local Native Americans, who can visit -- unless test bombs are dropping.)

But it’s also true that people feel an urge to decorate, create, leave their mark on the land. Perhaps the petroglyphs were nothing more than that.

In the end, it is simply magical that they are there, no matter what was in the heads of the people who, thousands of years ago, chipped them and scraped them by the sweat of their brows.

rosie.mestel@latimes.com

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Glyph dwellers

GETTING THERE:

Ridgecrest is about 155 miles northeast of Los Angeles, about a three-hour drive, up California 14.

WHERE TO STAY:

Carriage Inn, 901 N. China Lake Blvd.; (760) 446-7910, www.carriageinn.biz. No frills, but clean and comfortable. Doubles from $75.

EconoLodge Inn and Suites, 201 Inyo-Kern Road; (760) 446-2551, www.choicehotels.com. Comparable to other chains in town. Doubles $58.49.

WHERE TO EAT:

Astorga’s Mexican Grill, 411 S. China Lake Blvd.; (760) 375-9993. Competent traditional Mexican fare -- sopes, chile verde, burritos, carnitas -- in a cheery, basic diner. Entrees $9-$14.

Kristy’s Family Restaurant, 430 S. China Lake Blvd.; (760) 375-9132. Burgers, sandwiches, salmon, pancakes, waffles, omelets. Dinners $8-$11, including entree, soup and salad.

WHAT TO DO:

Petroglyph tours: Maturango Museum, 100 E. Las Flores Ave., Ridgecrest; (760) 375-6900, www.maturango.org, operates tours in fall and spring. Apply early. Security clearance required; noncitizens must apply three weeks in advance. Bring sturdy shoes, long pants and lots of water. Be sure you can handle the walk; in places it’s a scramble. No pets or children younger than 10. $35 per person.

Randsburg: A populated high-desert mining town 20 miles south of Ridgecrest.

TO LEARN MORE:

Ridgecrest Chamber of Commerce, (760) 375-8331, www.ridgecrestchamber.com.

-- Rosie Mestel