Honoring Native Land

Mount Stirling and the Spring Mountains have served as an important cross-roads and desert oasis for humans for at least 13,000 years. The earliest people are believed to have focused on big game animals that roamed the margins of the numerous Pluvial Period lakes the filled the valleys surrounding the Spring Mountains and left the playas and sand dune systems we are familiar with today. These early traditional peoples foraged into the surrounding mountains for additional hunting and gathering opportunities including hunting rabbits, deer, and bighorn sheep, and gathering seeds, roots, tubers, berries and nuts. They also used the springs in the area for raising gardens of concentrated native food crops. Mount Stirling surely was visited by these early people for the available resources and for the prominent position the mountain inhabits within their cultural landscape. Today Mount Stirling is recognized as an area of cultural importance for Newe (Western Shoshone), Southern Paiute, and Chemehuevi Paiute, people. Nuvagantu (“Snow Mountain” in the Paiute language) is part of many creation stories and is a fountain of life. Nuvagantu reaches into the sky, pulls down rain and snow, then purifies this life-giving water in its layers of rocks. The Southern Paiute refers to themselves as Nipakanticimi (or Nuaguntits), roughly translating to “the people of Nuvagantu.” Puha, the Paiute word for the power or energy in the universe, is believed by traditional peoples to be highly concentrated in the area and focused at very specific site. Perhaps this explains the curious distribution of petroglyphs found within the Wilderness lands. The abundant petroglyph elements in the area represent a considerable diverse culturally-mixed use of the area. An unusual petroglyph site extends along the summit ridge north of Mount Stirling itself. Other indigenous sites include milling equipment, which may be indicative of a pine nut processing site. There are several rock circles, situated on a slope overlooking a wash which could be the remnants of a village encampment. All artifacts are protected by law. Please respect these lands and traditional uses by Native American people who have utilized these lands as an important part of their respective cultures for countless generations. Do not touch or walk upon petroglyphs.

Natural History

Geology
The Mount Stirling area is comprised predominantly of Late Proterozoic (900 mya) and Lower Cambrian (570 mya) siliciclastic strata and minor limestone deposited on the continental shelf and overlain by Upper Cambrian (550 mya) to Permian (275 mya) carbonate strata. The northern Spring Mountains contain a complexly faulted, easterly dipping section of these Proterozoic and Paleozoic rocks, which is folded into the broad Wheeler syncline in the southern and eastern parts of the study area. The Late Proterozoic Stirling Quartzite (700 mya) is a sequence of quartzite and minor shale, dolomite, and siltstone. It usually crops out in large bluffs to low ledges and forms prominent razorbacks on most ridges. Many quartzite beds are characteristically pink due to the presences of an iron-based matrix. The grain size in the quartzite generally ranges from granule to fine sand with a mode of coarse sand. These minerals reflect a low greenschist grade of metamorphism. Cambrian (570-500 mya) rocks in the study area consist of shale, siltstone, and quartzite with limestone and dolomite increasing up section and include the Wood Canyon Formation and the overlying Carrara Formation. Capping the Paleozoic carbonate sequence is the Carboniferous (330 mya) and Permian Bird Spring Formation (275 mya). This formation is overthrust by the Wheeler Pass sheet of rocks. Quaternary alluvial fans on the east and west flanks of the range are composed of clasts of rocks eroded from the Precambrian and Paleozoic formations exposed in the higher parts of the range.