Coso Junction

Coso Junction looks like a simple gas-and-restroom stop in the wide, sage-covered bowl of Rose Valley. But the low brown ridge climbing to your east is the Coso Range, and few places along this highway hide so much behind such a plain face.

The name "Coso" comes from a Numic word of the Shoshone and Paiute who lived here long before any road did. Tucked in those hills is the Coso Volcanic Field — domes, cinder cones, and obsidian flows, the youngest erupting roughly 40,000 years ago. That glassy black obsidian was treasure. For thousands of years people quarried it at Sugarloaf and nearby peaks, knapped it into razor-edged tools, and traded it astonishingly far; chemically fingerprinted Coso obsidian turns up at Chumash sites on the distant Pacific coast.

Deeper in the range, in Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons, lies the Coso Rock Art District — one of the densest concentrations of rock art in the Western Hemisphere, with tens of thousands of images, above all bighorn sheep and horned figures that scholars link to hunting and ceremony. Off to the east are the Coso Hot Springs, known as Kooso or Muattang Ka, a healing and ceremonial place still sacred to Paiute, Shoshone, and Timbisha people today.

Most of that country now sits inside the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, taken by the Navy in the 1940s and closed to the public — the same geothermal heat that drew worshippers now spins turbines for the base. The "Coso" name itself rode in on the 1860 silver rush, when prospectors chasing the legend of the Lost Gunsight Mine founded a short-lived camp in these hills. The boom faded within a few years; the obsidian, the carvings, and the steam remain.