The Petroglyph Festival
Near Ridgecrest, California
Because the Coso rock art sits locked away on a naval range, most people will never walk among those ancient carvings. So each autumn Ridgecrest brings the spirit of the petroglyphs to town. The Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival began in twenty fourteen, and in its very first year it drew more than fifteen thousand visitors, an enormous crowd for a small desert city.
Held on a weekend in early November, timed to Native American Heritage Month, the festival fills a city park with an intertribal powwow, a street fair, live music, storytelling, educational workshops, and rows of Native American artists selling their crafts. The whole gathering honors the Coso Rock Art District, that vast National Historic Landmark inside China Lake with as many as one hundred thousand carvings. During the festival weekend, the Maturango Museum runs its guided tours out to the canyons, roughly four and a half hours long, though only when the base grants access.
The town even built its own small Petroglyph Park with replica carvings, so that anyone, any day of the year, can stand before the images that make this corner of the desert unforgettable.
