The motto here at VCC is, “Searching for Lost Secrets.” In
the past few months I’ve found a few of those secrets. I’m willing to share
some pictures of these places, but I won’t be giving out any clues to their specific
locations. It only takes a few moments for some greedy idiot to destroy something
that has been around for centuries.
A few months ago Frank and I drove up to Santa Barbara to
hunt down a couple of caves I had read about named Condor Cave and Pool Rock. They
both are in Campbell Grants’ book The Rock Paintings of the Chumash as plates SB- 17 and SB-11 respectively. The
only information I had about these sites was the trailhead to start at, a few pictures of the
rock formations the caves were in, and a cryptic clue I had found on the
internet.
We got lucky and were able to figure out the clues that led
us to the first site, Condor Cave. This cave has some very nice, very large
paintings. There is also a hole in the cave wall that may or may not be Chumash
made. I certainly don’t have the expertise to tell.
Hole in the cave wall and a couple of bedrock mortars
High off that victory we wanted to find Pool Rock. I knew it
was relatively close by, but I had no idea what direction to start looking. We
looked at the pictures I had brought and inspected them closely. Some of the
rocks in the background of the picture looked a lot like some the rocks we
could see from where we stood. Based on that we decided on a direction and headed
out. By this time the sun was really blasting us. We were able to persevere, and eventually
we saw Pool Rock in the distance.
This is a huge rock formation with a couple of small caves
around the base. This site has paintings
as well as petroglyphs. All around the
entrance to the main cave are small circular recesses. They look like miniature
mortar holes.
A few months went by before we went out looking for more
lost secrets. This time we went looking in the Ventura backcountry. The next
cave we found had just a few simple paintings in it. None the less it was a
very satisfying find.
The last cave I’ll tell you about took me a long time to
find. I’ve been out searching for it many times before with no luck. This time
I was really motivated to put some miles under my feet and find this sucker. I
covered a lot of ground this day hiking up one drainage then another. Then when
I had less than five minutes to go before my self-imposed turn around time I
saw a Forest Service sign-in post that meant rock art was near. I then ignored
the turn around mandate and I proceeded to take some pictures and enjoy the
satisfaction of finally finding this long hidden secret.
I'm not sure if this Chumash painting or not
This sure is
