Their comment revealed only mild disappointment as they approached the desk at the Visitor Center and said, "We just hiked to The Chimneys but never found the cave paintings." I went to the Book Store shelf in the next room and showed them the color plate of the petroglyphs carved into the rock face about nine feet above the main trail. I added an explanation that it was unlikely that the 'artists' used ladders or scaffolding to reach so far up but that the trail had been eroded away in the thousand or so years since the etching was made.
Drawings by archaic people are not all 'cave paintings.' There are such drawings here in the American Southwest, usually on the walls of rock shelters, like those in the near-by Seminole Canyon State Park. As common, or even more so, are petroglyphs. These are not drawings or paintings but a kind of pointillist art achieved by chipping at a flat stone surface to peck away dots of the rock's patina to make figures of creatures or geometric shapes appear. Some of the creature depictions are recognizable but more often the shapes and forms are lost like the language and beliefs of the Ancient Ones.
The Chimneys is an igneous rock outcropping, the result of volcanic activity millions of years ago. The rock prominences are more like phallic towers than womb-like shelters. So no 'cave art.' Had the young couple spent more time letting the landscape reveal itself, they might have seen the rock engravings. They went expecting to find what was not there and then did not discover what was.
It is not how far you go that makes a hike, it is how you go far that makes one.
