After about ten days on the road it was time to swing into a town to refuel and refill the fridge. Barstow lies on the edge of the Mojave National Preserve and also happened to be on our way to our next destination, so we made a few quick stops and then we headed out beyond Barstow for a few more days of adventure.
Note: This story is part of the series South to Spring. Click the link or head to our timeline for the other chapters of the trip.
We were still in the larger Mojave Desert, just not the National Preserve. There were a few sites that looked interesting in this area when we made our plans back home. After setting up camp at Owl Canyon campground for a couple days and went to see what the desert beyond Barstow had to offer. We took a drive through the colorful Rainbow Basin and hiked up Owl Canyon.
There seems to be a lot of opportunities to view rock art in various places around Barstow. There are several sites to find petroglyphs, and one site had another form of rock art new to us, geoglyphs. We headed out to see what we could find. After several miles of rough roads and a couple dead ends, we found what we were looking for.
We also found some amazing spring flowers along the way, the desert was starting to come alive.
We’d been out beyond Barstow to the north for a couple days, but it was time to keep moving south. More rock art was in our future, including those geoglyphs.
Apparently they have a cattle harassment problem in this area. Or maybe the cows in this area are just the sensitive shy type.
It took some looking (which is a good thing) but we found the geoglyphs. These are rocks laid out in a pattern with one thought to be bighorn sheep horns. There appeared to be some other patterns too, but either they have been obscured by time or it could be my lack of imagination not receiving the message they were sending. It is still impressive to see something so old enduring today.
Since we were in the neighborhood we also wandered over to view a few more petroglyphs. There seemed to be hundreds along the rock walls of the canyon.
We found one more camp for the night south of Barstow and the desert treated us to another stellar sunset.
We’d be changing locations with a jump south in the morning. It was time to revisit Joshua Tree National Park.
