Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival

The tradition & historical record

The Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival is an annual weekend-long festival held in Ridgecrest, California, celebrating the Coso people, and specifically the 10,000-year-old petroglyphs of the Coso Rock Art District. The festival was founded in 2014, and attracted over 15,000 guests in its first year and was named one of Groupon's "10 Most Unique Autumn Festivals in the Country". Events include an intertribal powwow, street fair, and guided tours to the local petroglyphs. ¹

The festival is focused on petroglyphs, with several tours throughout the weekend, organized by the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest. Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons, the sites of the Coso petroglyphs, are located within the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, creating an undisturbed home for over 20,000 documented images. Several tribes come together the weekend of the annual festival to be a part of the intertribal powwow held the same weekend. The 2014 festival featured a performance by famed Native American flautist R. Carlos Nakai (Navajo/Ute). In 2014, a Petroglyph Park was created in Ridgecrest, featuring replicas of several of the famous petroglyphs in the area. A virtual festival took place in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Ridgecrest Petroglyph Festival is recorded in open cultural data. The structured record cited below does not describe the practice, and this entry has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²