In the morning we walked down to the petroglyphs from our camp. There was a near vertical cliff made of flat vertical sections of rocks separated by natural cracks. The local Indians had drawn pictures on these that were presumably hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old. Sid pointed to one of the pictures that he convincingly told us was a picture of a Spanish sailing ship! So this was graffiti left behind by the Spaniards that came to set up the nearby mission Francisco! On top of all this were some very recent initials and hearts drawn with blue stray paint. I’m hoping that the blue paint will burn off from the sun in only a hundred years or so and let the older graffiti show through again.
Sid pointed to other pictures that were of human and other shapes. He had strong opinions about what some of the pictures were and when I compared his interpretations to “reading clouds” he took umbrage with that. I pointed to one of the pictures and said that this one looked like a rubber stamp to me. How did the ancient Indians know what a rubber stamp looked like? Why was this picture drawn in good perspective where all the other pictures were flat? Sid ignored my rubber stamp interpretation. We drove out to look at the mission, which is fenced off, and read the signs there. Then we drove straight back out to San Diego, only stopping for lunch and to buy gasoline.
