Chitactac-Adams County Park

The bee’s wings so fast my camera could not catch them.

Chitactac-Adams county park is a remarkable place. For hundreds of years this was the home of Native peoples. We can say that about all of California. But here, you can touch…

Those, in the picture above, are mortars ground into the rock from hundreds of years ago, made by the people who lived here along the Uvas Creek, grinding food from the land around… and you can touch them! There are many of them and it is wonderful to imagine the many hours of their use, the people who were here before in the same space as I occupy now, leaning over these bowls in the rock, and touching history.

On the annual family day, you can do crafts, watch a Native American ceremony, play traditional games, and learn. My children loved making jewelry from pine nuts that they turned into beads by grinding off the two sides and cleaning out the hole through the center.

It is a beautiful place with so much nature to look at. Some of the branches are amazing, like lightning bolts, jerking horizontally through the air above. I try, but the pictures below don’t do the lightening branches justice, try and marvel at them in person if you get the chance.

Hundreds of years with people living here along the river (the Chitactac part of the park name), nearly 100 years with an old school house (the Adams part of the park name), and then the last hundred years, until the recent fences to protect the petroglyphs went up, as a favorite jumping-off-into-the-river point for the local children. Remnants of the rope swing can still be seen, and adults can still be found who will talk of their youth and jumping off the big rock into the creek.