It is a privilege of the journalistic profession to maintain an open line to the people in the community you serve. And it is intriguing to receive a phone call and hear someone describe something that takes us out of the monotony of routine, into our imagination and into a past shared by all who live here.

Rudyard Kipling wrote the following, in his poem “If…”

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too…

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it…”

Glyn Hall believes that he has found more than a hundred petroglyphs, or rock carvings, around his garden near Elk Hill.

He invited me to view his discoveries and I drove to his home, which is nestled in a landscape of green and growth and a nearby railroad.

Hall led me to a table covered with rocks spread across a calfskin in which he has deciphered bears and cougars and people. There are even stones on which, he said, you can witness animated stories, stories of both successful hunts and failed ones that took down warriors.

“This hunter was killed by the very thing he went to hunt,” Hall said, pointing out an image of what may be a human crushed beneath its prey.

When explaining his ability to identify these items, he told me that he has a gift for seeing patterns in mathematics and algorithms.“I see things that other people don’t see—but that doesn’t mean they’re not there,” he said. “I can prove that today.”

He added, “I actually know what I’m talking about.”

I think he does.

I believe that he has discovered something, although perhaps what exactly that is, has yet to be definitively determined.

Chris Stevenson, regional archaeologist for the state Department of Historic Resources, examined Hall’s finds.

Stevenson said that although there were items he considered authentic, including a boulder on which appears to the carving of an eagle, he thinks that the majority are the result of natural weathering.

“I urged him to find something that’s quite definitive in terms of its shape—handmade rather than weathering configuration,” he said. “And there is always the chance that he could be right on some of these things.”

In any case, Hall is determined to keep searching.

“I can sense them, I can feel them,” he said of the pieces he continues to collect. “And generally, if you find one of these in a lifetime, you’re doing something right!”