by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
In New Mexico, there are entire mountains made of granite. There are angry, razor-crested seas of blackening lava rock. And there are sandstone buttes and mesas, slickrock canyons and cliff-sides, and the dusty, sunburnt, boulder-choked beds of long-dry creeks and rivers.
Many such rocky scenes serve as the quiet sites of aging rock art: the settings for petroglyphs, made by chipping away the sun-darkened surface of desert rocks, and the settings for pictographs, made by painting on rocks using mashed-up plants or minerals for color. These rocks feature literally hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs and pictographs - aging pictures of faces and symbols and animals - pictures made by ancient cultures such as the Ancestral Puebloan and Mogollon Indians, by Apaches and Navajos, by early Spanish explorers and by Anglo frontiersmen. Much has been written about these historic images in tourist brochures, books and magazines, but such writings usually address only older carvings. They seem to imply that somehow, before the invention of cars, history worth wondering about suddenly, inexplicably, stopped.
But, of course, it didn't.
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For as long as there are people, there will be history - and there will be rock art. Much of today's so-called rock art is, of course, little more than vandalism, but there are actually a number of mysterious post-1900 New Mexico petroglyphs and pictographs worth
examining now that you have some time off for spring break.
One such modern petroglyph hangs incised into a natural rock wall in the city of Los Alamos, a city most famous for the work scientists did in developing the first
atomic bomb.
"In Los Alamos Canyon, just below Trinity Drive, an old trail used by 1940s-era Girl Scouts winds its way through the woods near the site of a former nuclear reactor," wrote James Rickman of Btno.blogspot.com, a popular Los Alamos-area blog. "Just beyond the Girl Scouts' old latrine area, you can find a rock inscribed with Einstein's famous equation describing the relationship between matter and energy ..."
That inscription reads simply: "E = mc2," but it is cut clearly and deeply into the rock, as if it held great significance to its inscriber, and it is speckled with lichen, as if it has been there for years. The inscription is rumored to have been chiseled into the rock sometime in the 1940s. If that's true, it was likely carved by a Los Alamos scientist. Whoever carved it was well aware that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, and without that equation, it would be impossible to estimate the potential energy in a nuclear reaction; and without that equation, he would have been unable to help create the bomb. The inscription is undoubtedly modern, and yet it is undeniably historic.
Elsewhere in New Mexico, on a rocky ridge along the southwest end of the Sandia Mountains, there is a modern pictograph painted on a remote boulder, overlooking Interstate 40 near the east side of Albuquerque. The pictograph is of a large eye, the Eye of the Sandias, with a Zia Symbol filling its iris, and tears streaming down from it.
"The Eye appeared sometime in the 1960s, but the originator is
unknown," wrote Mike Coltrin in his Sandia Mountain Hiking Guide. "In the spring of 2002 it was freshly repainted by someone. Urban legend has it that the Eye represents a symbol of sadness and protest at the encroachment of the city on
the mountain."
The Eye of the Sandias can be reached by parking at the eastern end of Albuquerque's Copper Avenue, hiking up around a stand of utility poles, and following a nameless trail over multiple hills for about two hours. It's a simple painting, and a fairly recent one, but because of its picturesque locale, its mysterious origins, and what it seems to say about an increasingly urban New Mexico, people seem to love it, to regard it as something significant, and to be moved by it almost to poetry.
"Someone just painted it," gushed veteran area hiker Dave Holmes. "It's kind of neat."
Mike Smith is a UNM history major and the author of Towns of the Sandia Mountains, available at the UNM Bookstore and online. E-mail him your suggestions for future columns at AntarcticSuburbs@yahoo.com.
