Petroglyphs in the Bennetts

Story and Photos by Ray Brooks

From 2004 to 2008, I undertook a search for every petroglyph in the Bennett Mountain Hills, which cover about sixty miles generally north of Mountain Home and Shoshone. This somewhat obsessive effort involved fifteen to thirty days of exploration in each of those years. After that, my interest waned, but I still managed to produce an annual “petroglyph report” through 2011.

I hiked in about twenty percent of the Bennetts, as most locals call them, where I located maybe ninety percent of the petroglyphs in the range. Nowadays, my wife Dorita and I venture about once a year into the Bennetts to revisit favorite historical rock art sites.

Petroglyphs, which are chipped, pecked, or scratched on polished basalt surfaces, are almost the only type of rock art in the Bennett Hills. Pictographs, which are painted on smooth surfaces, have been reported in only two lava tube caves near the Bennetts.

These petroglyphs are found almost exclusively on the heavily varnished or patinated basalt rock surfaces of south-facing slopes of the hills. Different names are used to describe petroglyph motifs, depending on which anthropologist you consult. The representational style (also called anthropomorphic) usually shows humans or animals.

The abstract style includes figures that don’t appear to represent creatures. Scratched petroglyphs are composed of straight lines scratched into the rock. The Great Basin carved abstract style includes petroglyphs that can be up to an inch deep. They usually have a heavy patina and are thought to be the oldest petroglyphs.

I’ve found only a couple places with this style of petroglyph in the Bennetts. More recent petroglyphs that have been chiseled into the dark-patinated basalt are themselves light-colored. As hundreds or thousands of years pass, petroglyphs usually slowly darken to the shade of the basalt they were pecked out of.