Rock Art

The air was clear and fresh. Heat from the sun radiated from volcanic rubble, intensifying a midday temperature in the high 70s. Some nights were mild; some were frigid. But always, as the winter light waned, a concert began. Doves sang plaintive songs from the red willows or palms that lined the pools. Frogs started croaky calls, so loud at times that our tent vibrated in the echoes. Owls occasionally swooped up the canyon, hooting softly. Seldom was there silence. My husband, Charles, and I had come to this remote part of central Baja California, about 140 miles southeast of Guerrero Negro, last January to see rock art. Primitive art can be found throughout the Baja Peninsula, but the mountains and canyons of the Sierra de San Francisco are so peppered with paintings, pictographs and petroglyphs -- some as much as 4,000 years old -- that the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization designated the area a World Heritage Site in 1993.

Storm Thorgerson Creator of album art for Pink Floyd, Zeppelin Storm Thorgerson, 69, an English graphic designer whose eye-popping album art for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin encapsulated the spirit of 1970s psychedelia, died Thursday. In a statement from London, his family gave few details but said that the artist, who suffered a stroke in 2003, had cancer. Thorgerson, whose art tended toward the unsettling or the bizarre, was best known for his surreal Pink Floyd covers, which guitarist David Gilmour said had long been "an inseparable part of our work.

The definitive book on Baja's cave paintings ("A Trek to Hidden Troves of Rock Art," Oct. 27) is "The Cave Paintings of Baja California," written by Harry Crosby and published by Copley Books. Sally Gutman Studio City

HORSESHOE CANYON, Utah - In a remote arm of Canyonlands National Park, deep inside a warren of rock and sand, is one of the greatest and most mysterious collections of ancient art in North America. Towering, enigmatic pictographs, some more than 6,000 years old, stare down from stone walls, their meaning unknown yet their allure universal. This is Horseshoe Canyon, one of the loneliest places you're likely to find in this country, nestled amid southeast Utah's labyrinth of slickrock, arches and desert.

Vandals have scratched a panel known as the Blue Buffalo out of existence in the last three weeks, destroying priceless rock art created about 200 years ago in Utah's southeast desert. The decimated rock art featured a shield, several figures and a bison painted on a large sandstone panel tucked into a canyon about 15 miles northwest of Moab near Mill Canyon.

The story of man's journey on the continent that gave him birth is told on rocks throughout northern Africa's great Sahara. It was a greener, gentler Sahara then, an idyllic place where prehistoric man paused to draw pictures of life as he saw it. And the Saharan rock art he created remains a dramatic--albeit endangered--record of his sojourns: A boy tethers a pet giraffe. Salukis--desert greyhounds--lead hunters to the kill. Antelopes roam. Herders chat as cattle gather.

Along the Rincon Parkway just north of Ventura sit tiny towers of smooth stones shrouded in gray seaside fog. Some are assembled in fanciful patterns and intricate designs atop giant boulders, like a forest of baby rock trees. To the passing motorist, the delicately balanced formations could be confused for misplaced trail markers or a mini-Stonehenge.

Pounding surf and buffeting winds slowly chip away the sandstone walls of a cave on San Nicolas Island, erasing the only rock art left by a mysterious tribe of ancient islanders. Many of the whales or fish icons chiseled into the stone are no longer visible. The black painted pictographs can barely be distinguished from the blue-green algae that cling to the crumbling surface.

Pounding surf and buffeting winds slowly chip away the sandstone walls of a cave on San Nicolas Island, erasing the only rock art left by a tribe of mysterious ancient islanders. Many of the whales or fish icons chiseled into the stone are no longer visible. The black painted pictographs can barely be distinguished from the blue-green algae that cling to the crumbling surface. Archeologists want to protect the artwork from further deterioration at the remote site they call Cave of the Whales.

You can see the past etched into the face of a boulder in the Bowers Museum courtyard, a maze of thin lines created by Native Americans thousands of years before Orange County's landscape succumbed to cul-de-sacs and freeways, industrial parks and glass cathedrals. This ancient maze, hauled in from the nearby Santa Ana Mountains, is one of the few samples of tribal rock art on exhibit locally.

From 1965 to 1967, British artist Alan Aldridge was the art director of Penguin UK, bringing an edgy, growingly psychedelic design sensibility to its always culture-clashing paperbacks. Eventually, Aldridge and the publisher parted ways, and he spent time designing for rock stars such as Elton John, Mick Jagger and John Lennon. The snapshots are a fun addition to the art in his book "The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes: The Art of Alan Aldridge," released in the U.S. this month after an exhibition of the same name at the Design Museum in London.

In bouldering lingo, a climbing route is called a "problem." Some problems here in Hueco Tanks State Historic Site are tougher than others. Mine was a gentle overhang pocked with shallow depressions, among the easiest routes in the park. No need for a 5-inch-thick pad to soften my landing, I thought. After all, I'm only a few feet off the ground.

LET OTHERS talk about the lure of art from China. James Elaine did something about it. He moved there. "China is here to stay," says Elaine, an artist and curator who has organized edgy exhibitions and introduced emerging figures at the UCLA Hammer Museum for the last decade. "The culture, the art world, it's not a fad of the West that's going to fade away. China is a power."

RENO, Nev. -- U.S. Forest Service officials never believed John Ligon's claim that he dug up three boulders etched with American Indian petroglyphs four years ago to put them in his front yard for safekeeping. But they did share a concern he voiced that someone would steal the centuries-old rock art on national forest land a few football fields away from a growing housing development.

Alanah Woody, a scholar in the study of rock art who helped lead efforts to protect ancient American Indian petroglyphs and pictographs, has died. She was 51. Woody, who taught anthropology and archeology at the University of Nevada, Reno, died Thursday, a few days after becoming ill, her family told the Reno Gazette-Journal. The cause of death was heart failure, the Associated Press reported.

Memories of 1980 at Occidental College's Haines Hall have the standard fragments of the era: stereos blasting the B-52's through the dorm, pot-fueled bull sessions about the revival of draft registration, late-night cramming for economics exams. That otherwise private nostalgia took on public significance this month when a former Haines Hall resident from Hawaii known at the time as Barry announced that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States. U.S. Sen.

No matter how many times archeologist Russell Kaldenberg roams Renegade Canyon, its volcanic rock reveals new magic. Depending on the season or the slant of the sun, the dark stone will erupt with chalk-white images, carved over the past 16,000 years, that he hasn't seen before. There are bighorn sheep and long-tailed cougars scratched into the walls of the high desert corridor.

RENO, Nev. -- U.S. Forest Service officials never believed John Ligon's claim that he dug up three boulders etched with American Indian petroglyphs four years ago to put them in his front yard for safekeeping. But they did share a concern he voiced that someone would steal the centuries-old rock art on national forest land a few football fields away from a growing housing development.

No matter how many times archeologist Russell Kaldenberg roams Renegade Canyon, its volcanic rock reveals new magic. Depending on the season or the slant of the sun, the dark stone will erupt with chalk-white images, carved over the past 16,000 years, that he hasn't seen before. There are bighorn sheep and long-tailed cougars scratched into the walls of the high desert corridor.

Deep in the Topatopa Mountains above Ojai, a red snake slithers across a sandstone outcrop. The reptile hasn't moved from the rock where a Chumash Indian painted it centuries ago. Now a quartet of researchers is working to ensure the snake image never leaves. The Santa Barbara-based Rock Art Documentation Group calls the site Serpent Cave.