Painted Rock, Carrizo Plain
Carrizo Plain, California, United States
A horseshoe of sandstone in the Carrizo Plain bearing Chumash and Yokuts pictograph panels, reached now only on BLM-led tours to protect the paintings.
Painted Rock is a horseshoe-shaped sandstone outcrop in the Carrizo Plain, and its protected inner walls carry some of the most significant surviving pictograph panels in North America: human figures, serpents, geometric and aquatic motifs in red, black, white and yellow, painted by Chumash and Yokuts peoples whose descendants maintain ties to the site. The plain around it is a quarter-million acres of grassland crossed by the San Andreas Fault, one of the quietest large landscapes left in California.
The paintings' exact ages are debated, and the site's recent history is a conservation story: after graffiti and damage, the Bureau of Land Management closed the rock to unsupervised access, and today it is reached only through reserved tours from the Goodwin Education Center, guided or self-guided with ticketed time slots. The tours interpret the panels without publishing sensitive specifics, and photography of the pictographs is permitted while flash and touching are not.
Visiting
BLM's Carrizo Plain tours page and Recreation.gov carry the tour reservations (guided and self-guided types), the seasonal Goodwin Education Center schedule and current rules. Monument entry is free; the tour ticket is the access.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pictograph_at_Painted_Rock,_Carrizo_Plain_1_%288159055148%29_%282%29.jpg), public domain, US Fish and Wildlife Service Pacific Southwest Region.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories