2014 Trip Photos - Inscription Canyon / Black Canyon

Inscription Canyon (Black Canyon)

Saturday, January 11

By: Mal Roode

Trip Leader Nelson Miller and his group which included Ron and Barb Midlikoski, Nelson Miller, Bob Jacoby, Allan Wicker, Nan Savage and myself met at the Barstow Museum at 8:30 a.m. Barb opened up the museum and made coffee for all. At approximately 9:00 a.m. we headed out.

     Our first stop was Rainbow Basin. A little further down the road we saw a U.S.G.S. weather station off to the side of the road and stopped to check that out. The next stop was the petroglyphs at Murphys Well and then Inscription Canyon where we hiked all around the canyon. When we got back to our parked cars Ranger J. Wilcox snuck up on us. He said he was hoping to catch people doing something bad but he told us “you are doing good.” Boy we sure fooled him!

   We stopped for lunch at the Birdman Petroglyph and there was a nice Indian Grinding Rock nearby. After lunch we went to the Indian shelter caves, then on to Scouts Cove. There was a nice miner’s dugout’ The Tiffany Company formerly mined fire opals. Here. We continued on to Black Canyon Well and a little bit past that was Black Canyon Stage Stop. Next we had to find the elusive Spiderman petroglyph. None of us had found it before but the GPS coordinates were in Bill Mann’s book. After about 20 minutes using my handheld GPS we finally found it. It was well worth the effort. A little bit further we stopped and saw lots of great petroglyphs and old inscriptions on the sides of Black Canyon.

     Many thanks to Nelson Miller for leading this trip and to Bill Mann for writing the book where Nelson found the location for most of these sites. Everyone had a great time and we all headed out through Hinkley and went our separate ways.

See the gallery of photos taken by Allan Wicker