Hunting in the In-Ko-Pah Mountains

Went on a 2 day backpacking trip to hunt for pictographs in the In-Ko-Pah mountains. The night sky was perfect for star gazing, I could easily see the Andromeda Galaxy with my binoculars and shooting stars were streaking across the sky all night, especially from 3am-5am when I easily saw 3-4 per minute it seemed like.

Jupiter may be one of the outer bright streaks, not sure
(Olympus OM-2s, 28mm, f/5.6, Lomography 100 ISO color film)


The hunt was good, we found some new pictographs on a panel I had visited before but did not see them because they are so faint. I still did not see them while photographing the "blank" boulder face but DStretch made them pop out once I got home and processed the photos.

Here is a 5 image stitched photo of what looked like a blank boulder face


Here is the DStretched version...it revealed two different pictographs


Lets look at a couple of the individual images used to stitch everything together, they will show more detail.

Here is the top section before/after



Here is the bottom section before/after



Just amazing...you simply cannot see these pictographs staring at the boulder!

Here is another panel that I did not see a pictograph on, mostly because I was focused on the obvious one below it. These photos reveal another sun burst above and to the right of the obvious one.



If you have Manfred Knaak's book The Forgotten Artist: Indians of Anza-Borrego and Their Rock Art and look on page 73 you will see a panel of rock art that looks like it is in pretty good condition. He credits the Museum of Man for the photo so chances are it is from the 30's or 40's, possibly from Malcolm Rodgers.

I used an old 1937 camera and old expired color film to photograph it as best I could to match, here are the results



The photo in Knaak's book looks awfully good compared to what I photographed last weekend, I wonder if the deterioration over the years is genuine or if the older photo in the book was modified somehow to represent more of what the photographer believed he/she saw.

Here are a few more before/after photos of the same panel













Total Mylar Balloons this trip - 4 (sorry, no photo)