8,000 Years of Petroglyphs on the Shore of a Vanished Lake
US Highway 50, Fallon, NV 89406
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free admission. No fees for self-guided trail or Hidden Cave tours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Short loop trail is mostly level and stroller/wheelchair accessible. Hidden Cave trail is 1.9 miles with a hill climb — not recommended for young children or those with mobility limitations.
Equipment
Photos OK
The high desert east of Fallon, Nevada was not always high desert. Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, an ancient body of water that covered large portions of the Great Basin, reached its shoreline at what is now Grimes Point. The basalt boulders here — dark, heavy, volcanic — stood at the water's edge, and the communities who lived along that shoreline left their marks on them.
Human presence at the site dates back at least 8,000 years, and possibly longer. The petroglyphs follow what researchers classify as the Pit and Groove Style, considered among Nevada's oldest surviving rock art forms: small pits, cupules, and carved grooves worked into the basalt surface. Approximately 150 boulders along the quarter-mile interpretive trail bear this imagery. Their specific meaning has not been definitively interpreted.
The Bureau of Land Management, which administers the 720-acre site, added Grimes Point to the National Register of Historic Places on February 23, 1972, based on its potential to yield future archaeological information. That potential has been borne out repeatedly.
In 1939, guano miners discovered a small rock shelter on the site now called the Grimes Burial Shelter. Archaeologist Georgia Wheeler documented it and designated it Cave no. 16. The shelter contained well-preserved remains, including those of a child approximately ten years old and fragments of an older individual.
Hidden Cave, discovered by modern visitors in the 1920s and excavated most recently between 1979 and 1980, yielded evidence of use as a cache by ancient inhabitants approximately 3,500-3,800 years ago. A fragment of matting recovered from the site, identified as a unique diamond plaiting type, was dated in 1995 to approximately 9,470 years old — making it one of the oldest such textile specimens in the region.
Spirit Cave, a site where a mummy was recovered with similarly ancient radiocarbon dates, lies just north of the Grimes Burial Shelter. The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe regards Grimes Point and the surrounding area as ancestral territory. The petroglyphs represent, in the words of local interpretive materials, timeless records of the land maintained by people who inhabited the region continuously for thousands of years.
Sources
The paranormal reputation of Grimes Point is relatively modest in volume but consistent in character. Accounts describe glowing figures seen on nights when there is no moon, moving along what is now the loop trail and near Hidden Cave. Some reports locate these figures in what is described as the old mining area of the trail. They have also been observed, according to collected accounts, by visitors taking the cave tour.
A separate category of reports involves visitors sitting quietly on the rocks for an extended period — an hour or more — and experiencing what they describe as intense visions. This phenomenon, if we take it at face value, sits closer to the documented history of the site than most paranormal claims: the area was understood by Shoshone shamans as a place of spiritual significance, associated with vision quests and the belief that the land itself held living spirit. The petroglyphs may represent attempts to mark or communicate with those forces.
No specific named entities are associated with the site in documented sources. The Paiute-Shoshone Tribe views the petroglyphs and surrounding landscape as ancestral and spiritually significant. Whether the glowing figures reported on moonless nights have any relationship to the ceremonies once conducted here, or to the many thousands of years of human presence marked into the basalt, is a question the site itself does not answer.
Walk the 0.4-mile interpretive loop through approximately 150 basalt boulders covered with ancient petroglyphs, some carved in the Pit and Groove Style considered among Nevada's oldest rock art. Informational signage provides context on the prehistoric Lake Lahontan shoreline and the communities who created these markings over thousands of years.
Free BLM-led tours depart from the Churchill County Museum in Fallon (10 S Maine St) on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month at 9:30 a.m. The 2.5-hour tour covers the 1.9-mile Hidden Cave loop, visiting Picnic Cave, Hidden Cave exterior, and Burnt Cave. The site was used as a cache by ancient inhabitants approximately 3,500-3,800 years ago; unique diamond-plaited matting found here dates to roughly 9,470 years old.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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