High Sierra Topix

did you check for buried treasure

Be careful or you may find a TV crew filming about ancient Vikings, aliens, Templars, or somesuch who quite obviously left their calling card. But seriously, this looks to me like graffiti left by kids on a 1973 trip. And in 1973 they might have had a hard time holding their chisels straight.

One thought did occur to me after mulling this over....could this be from 1873? 150 years of weathering and flaking might explain our difficulties deciphering it. By 1873 miners were crawling all over the Sierra, but why they would announce their presence on a stone in a pass is beyond me, so I think the graffiti theory is stronger.

We visited it again last summer and poked down a little bit it seems like a pretty doable pass down to Sharktooth Lake. I was planning on visiting it when it was in shade later, but didn't get around to it as we ended up shifting plans.

Here's two more high resolution JPG images as well as their RAW files, and a video sort of panning around it to check out angles. 165MB folder.
https://drive.proton.me/urls/2MYCFYJ678#uVd6UaHmahI8

Our thoughts on this the second time were either STAROUTOR PASS AD 73 or STABOUTOR PASS AD 73. Star router (sp?) makes a bit more sense. A staboutor sounds like someone that sabotages things with daggers, but maybe someone ate a sharp edge of volcanic rock on a fall.

I do like the sound of Starbolator in terms of sheer ridiculousness, and hope to give it a shot someday.

I was talking pictographs & petroglyphs with someone from the Glen Canyon Historical Society and he mentioned http://www.dstretch.com as a tool for finding information in rock, but it seems to be mostly for pigments of pictos. :/

I think, given the proximity to Sharktooth Peak, it's a weathered or poorly rendered attempt to name it "Sharktooth Pass". Enough discernable letters are in the right positions for this to be a likely answer

That's a reasonable take at least for the first half of it - S*AR*. There are some O's after that, but nothing that I could see being a TOOTH. I'll keep that in mind if I'm ever there again (and it's a pretty area with some nice solitude for anyone else curious).

grampy wrote: ↑Thu Dec 16, 2021 4:26 pm I thought on this a little more, and wondered what if this was in another language; e.g. Spanish. This would add lots more possibilities; anyway likely an unsolvable mystery.

Or the "73" is 1873, and it was chiseled by a Basque shepherder. Does anyone on here read and/or speak Euskara?

Lumbergh21 wrote: ↑Mon May 08, 2023 9:42 pm Or the "73" is 1873, and it was chiseled by a Basque shepherder.

I had the exact same thought. What are the chances...?

Looking at it again, the most likely outcome was STAROUTOR.

The first R looks more like a theta and could be an "O" or "B".

The U could be "LI".

The last O could be an "A" or "E".

The rest of the letters seem fairly clear. There were some letters carved in with a knife above and to the left of the chisel marks, but they were indecipherable.

I made up a nice sci-fi setting about a STABOUTOR that zipped around space in a dark flight suit and EVA pack with a little lightsaber and disabled giant war machine spacecraft. :P

I'm guessing it was short for Star Router? Who knows.

Live video walkthrough of the chiseled lettering in 4k.

https://youtu.be/rKyjDH56dGc

How about st abola dr? According to OpenAI, Dr Samuel T Abola was a notable figure who hiked in Sierra Nevada in the 19th century. He is known for his explorations and contributions to the understanding of Sierra’s geography and natural history.