On December 8, 2019, 22 GCAS members congregated southeast of Hatch, New Mexico, to visit a petroglyph site most of us had never seen before. Weather forecasts threatened rain but luckily the trip stayed dry and overcast with wind increasing in the early afternoon; near-perfect conditions for photographing petroglyphs. The trail was generally easy to moderate, but one difficult section required scrambling across a canyon's side along a steep patch of rock that would have been impossible to safely traverse when wet.
Our group, co-led by GCAS member Marcia Corl of Las Cruces, first came across a boulder patch with deep and wide mortar holes. A mile or so further, we encountered multiple large rock panels, each covered with petroglyphs of various ages. Several were so thoroughly patinaed they have become almost invisible. It seemed that a chemical composition of the rock caused the pecked areas of some petroglyphs to become more pitted than the surrounding stone - in certain instances enhancing the images but in other cases tending to obscure the original outlines.
We found many common figures: faded spirals, grid patterns, zig-zag lines, anthropomorphs, footprints, and hand prints. However, this site is unique because its petroglyphs include not one, but three separate images of fish. Each fish is distinct from the other two. Two of the three fish images stand alone without other petroglyphs around them. Thus we of the GCAS unofficially christened this, The Three-Fish Site.
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