I had looked for this arrastra some time ago but instead found another mining camp. That ended up being a good trip, even without finding my elusive target. Still, it wasn’t an arrastra.
So, some time passed (actually, a few years), and it sort of dropped off my radar, as things do. I had other places to go and easier places to find. But of course, I didn’t forget about it. The ones that get away are always the hardest to forget, aren’t they?
Well, one day in 2014, I came across a good lead on some petroglyphs in my search area. I’m always interested in petroglyphs (who isn’t, right?), but these were in my search area for this little arrastra. I already knew my arrastra was next to some petroglyphs. This upped the ante.
And this time, I was lucky.
I still don’t know the background history of the Belden arrastra. I can guess that a prospector found some placer gold float in the wash and followed it to a source. He built the arrastra to work that source. Or perhaps he had a few local digs and worked them here. It remains a mystery.
The petroglyphs are mostly abstract and clustered around a small underground seep. I bet if I dug down, I would have found water at the ready. The one real surprise here was the red headless digitate anthropomorphic pictograph on a high rock pinnacle overlooking the wash below. I’m guessing it is of Serrano origin. I wonder how many hundreds of people drive by each year without seeing any of this? Quite a few, I imagine.
