Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

The panel's 21,000 is a count, and people made it. Over six years the Archaeological Society of New Mexico's rock art recording field schools walked the ridge and documented each image, and their photographs and records are on file at the Bureau of Land Management's Las Cruces office. The images were made by pecking through the dark desert varnish on the basalt to the lighter rock beneath. Dates differ by source: some put the carving between about 900 and 1200, others to 1400, with older and later images among them.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Three Rivers Petroglyph Site Three miles east of here is one of the most con- centrated arrays of petroglyphs in the Southwest. Along a mile-long volcanic ridge are some 21,000 images depicting animals, humans, plants and geo- metric shapes making it one of very few sites with public access to so many examples of rock art. The glyphs were etched into dense basalt rock with stone tools by the Jornada Mogollon people ca. 900 -1400 A.D. Sierra Blanca Peak towers above site.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Three Rivers Petroglyph Site — 4.9 mi
  More than 21,000 petroglyphs on a basalt ridge above the Tularosa Basin, one of the few places in the Southwest set aside for its rock art alone, walked on a rough half-mile trail.
• Trinity Site — 34 mi
  Where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945, open one day a year, and remembered by its neighbors as the start of decades of illness the government took eighty years to acknowledge.

More markers nearby

• Three Rivers — steps away
• Round Mountain — 16 mi
• Blazer's Mill — 18 mi
• Tularosa — 19 mi