Sunday, March 05, 2023

Upper Arrow Canyon, north of Las Vegas NV

Attracted by the name, I have tried a couple times to get into Arrow Canyon. This time I was careful to find the correct dirt road, taking me down into the canyon. Google street view of NV168 was helpful, cuz those dirt roads all look similar at their beginnings. I drove till it got too muddy, parked, and then started edging along the sides of the canyon, as I got deeper into it. There was an old stone house - no roof - near the beginning of the canyon, then some wild gourds or melons ...

... , then gravel slopes tumbling off the caprock, then some Ogham scratched in the Canyon wall, then a stone chamber, then a solid dam across the canyon. My guess is this dam was to prevent flash flooding downstream. Anyway, the dam was a barrier. There was a helpful rope for people to climb but that is not my idea of fun. It was getting late, so I turned back at the dam.

Here is a view of the dam and the, still unseen, deeper valley:
Anyway, the first gravel slope (a "talus slope") had some chalcedony ("cal-sed-ny") flakes and that was about the only arrowhead-hunting encouragement I got. (Well, I should mention this:)

So, I am walking down the left (east) edge of the valley. At the first talus slope, spilling into the valley from the left, I see an opportunity to get up to the cap rock (about 100 feet up) and I scrambled up there, one slow step at a time. Getting up to the cap rock, I walked out to a little peninsula, then started getting dizzy and had to back off. But one notices this little line of rocks and rock piles:

If you are familiar with alignments, you may spot this. Most people would just see rocks. 

While on the subject of spotting out-of-place rocks, this stopped me as I exited the canyon by car:
You see: there are a few too many rocks of the same size, propped up a bit too non-randomly. I got out and looked at them, They formed lines - sometimes lines that crossed at a single rock. All the lines pointed off somewhere towards the southeast - including the ones from earlier, up on top of the mesa.

So that was the NEARA trifecta: stone chambers, manitou stones, and alignments. As a nod towards NEARA's epigraphic roots in ESRA, we got a bonus feature: some Ogham (Oggam) writing. It is so amusing because - yeah -  I see the mystery but I have no skin in the game. I'll leave you with this:

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