I paused, staring into the black. The world stood still, the forest quiet. My heart purred steadily from the uphill trek. The mouth of the cave beckoned. It was so dark inside, as if all the light had been swallowed up. How curious.
As I stepped into the cave, a panicked voice, deep in the animal recesses of my brain, whispered at me to back. away. SLOWLY.
Years earlier, late one night, I became obsessed with a cave.
A strange video that I had stumbled upon sparked my interest. It showed a man's first person view as he walked through a mossy forest to the mouth of a cave. The cave sat at the base of a massive sandstone outcrop. To the right of the entrance stood a tree with a curved trunk shaped like an "S". Tribal flutes and drums played in the background. The camera moved slowly into the dark space. Inside, the walls were covered with ancient cave paintings.
I watched and rewatched the clip, transfixed. The puzzling designs of the paintings, their arrangement along the natural contours of the rock, the deep red color of the pigment, it all enthralled me so completely. My curiosity buzzed. Who painted those symbols? What do they mean? How old are they?
Where is the cave?
The man in the video talked about how a group of Bay Miwok known as the Volvon people used to live in the southeastern shadow of Mount Diablo. The mountain was sacred to them, the centerpiece of their creation myth. They had lived in those rolling hills and oak forests for centuries, maybe longer, when the Spanish arrived. Tragically, their population was decimated by fanatical missionaries, old world diseases, and murderous settlers. By the nineteenth century, there were no remaining villages in Volvon Territory. But the Volvons left their mark on the landscape in the form of bedrock mortars and a painted cave.
The story was eye-opening. All my life, this portal to the past was hiding just miles away, in the woods near my childhood home. The Volvon Cave.
At the end of the video, there was no map, no GPS coordinates, no directions to the cave. All I knew was that it was somewhere in the southeastern shadow of Mount Diablo, and I was going to find it.
The foothills of Mount Diablo have meant different things to me throughout my life. Some of my earliest and warmest memories live there: hikes with my family, ponds full of croaking frogs, morning sunlight filtering through scraggly branches of oaks. It was my earliest definition of nature. When I reached my teenage years, the landscape became an escape from suburban boredom. The summer before college, I taught myself photography amongst the sandstone cliffs and groves of oak. But after watching that video, the foothills took on a new meaning for me: the home of a lost culture and the painted cave they left behind.
Countless late nights were spent scouring the web for any clues that would lead me to the cave. I stared endlessly at the still frame from the video that showed the entrance to the cave, trying to identify any recognizable terrain in the blown out background. That frame was burned into my memory; the mossy rock, the slanted roof, the curved tree trunk shaped like an “S”.
While I struggled to find any actual information about the Volvon Cave, my eyes were opened to the incredible world of Native American rock art. There were so many other incredible pictographs and petroglyphs across California that I wanted to see for myself.
I quickly learned that finding rock art isn’t easy. The locations of most sites aren't public knowledge, and rock art enthusiasts are tight-lipped with their finds. Protecting the art is imperative to hobbyists and archaeologists alike, so almost no one shares directions or GPS coordinates publicly, and those who do get called out for it. Each search is a complex game of cross-referencing archaeological studies, trip report photos, rare books, satellite imagery, and other obscure sources of information to piece together the puzzle of a pictograph location.
Over the course of two years, my obsession took me all across California. I visited the vibrant, detailed pictographs of the Chumash in central California. I drove to the southernmost edge of California to witness the massive geoglyphs and rare blue pigments of the Kumeyaay, and all the way north to the border of Oregon where the Modoc people painted symbols in volcanic lava tubes. I even got security clearance from the Navy to visit Little Petroglyph Canyon, one of the largest and most well-preserved petroglyph sites in the nation, on an active weapons-testing base. I read books, took guided tours, and did everything I could to soak up information about indigenous rock art.
All the while, I made frequent trips to the southeastern shadow of Mount Diablo, investigating sandstone formations I'd found using satellite imagery. I figured that if the cave was near a trail, it wouldn’t be such a well-kept secret, so I trekked off-trail to the most remote corners of the region. On reconnaissance hikes to nearby high points, I surveyed the land in more detail and from different angles than the satellite imagery provided.
Still, the Volvon Cave eluded me. There just wasn’t enough information out there. The man who posted the video said that he wasn’t familiar with the area; he was taken there by someone else via a route that he couldn’t retrace. I had secondhand knowledge from a fellow searcher that I was looking in the right area, but that was it. I’d managed to find a few photos of the interior of the cave, posted online by a renowned archaeologist, but there were no clues in the captions or the comments. There were no trip reports from other rock art enthusiasts, no mentions in any scientific literature, no photos of the surrounding area, nothing.
On every trip, the backcountry tested my dedication. It was tough hiking across steep, chaparral-blanketed terrain. Rain poured down, mud slowed my progress. Poison oak was unavoidable. I fought my way up and down treacherous gullies, pulling on tree branches and flaky sandstone holds to advance. Whiteout conditions once made me take shelter under a dense oak during a rare Bay Area snowstorm. I would come home dirty, scraped, wet, covered in poison oak, and after a deep scrub in the shower, I'd get right back on Google Earth to try to figure out where I might’ve gone wrong.
Despite the repeated failures, the search was gratifying. It was a source of wonder. I learned to move efficiently off trail and honed my sense of direction. Along the way I found curiosities: deer skulls, a geocache in an ammo box, and a ripped up tarp with the words “NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER” printed on it. I felt like a kid again, when the hills were full of potential adventures and hidden treasures. I dangled my legs off cliffs, poked my head into caves, tumbled down slopes, searching for something I knew I’d probably never find. I was alone in the woods, in a surreal place that had gone virtually untouched for almost a hundred years.
After two years of searching, even though I hadn’t found the Volvon Cave, I could feel its presence. I knew I was in the right place. The sense of history was thick: there were mortar holes everywhere. Closing my eyes, I could almost see the cave, tucked away, waiting for me in some hidden corner of the terrain.
It was there. I just had to keep looking.
It had rained the night before, and conditions that morning weren’t ideal. Clumps of mud stuck to my shoes as I took a new approach route through the forest towards my search area. A few miles in, I started noticing big, mossy sandstone outcrops along the slope I was traversing. The presence of the rocks took me by surprise: the satellite imagery of that area didn’t show any sandstone, just woods. A gust of wind rustled through the trees above, calling my attention upwards. The canopy was thick enough to fully obscure the rocks from above. Moving along, I noticed small wind caves dotting the sandstone. Interesting.
One cave in particular caught my eye. It had a small entrance, about four feet in diameter. Most of the caves in that area were nothing more than shallow overhangs, but this one was deep enough that the entrance was pitch black. I could tell from the shape of it that it wasn’t the Volvon Cave, and there was no “S” shaped tree next to it, but I was intrigued nonetheless. Maybe there were undiscovered pictographs inside.
The wind died down and silence settled through the forest. I walked up the slope, my footsteps crunching through dead leaves, stopping just outside the cave entrance. The inside was still eerily dark. I turned on my phone flashlight and crouched down to peer into the black.
As I leaned forward through the threshold of the cave, a ferocious, bellowing sound exploded from within.
"RRRAWR!!!"
Panic ripped through my body. Mountain lion. The cat was just three feet in front of me, yet completely obscured by darkness. And it sounded big.
I sprinted away in blind terror, jumping over downed trees, glancing frantically backward, thrashing through branches, dreading the thought of seeing the predator emerge from its den in pursuit. Oh god run! Run! Run! Unescapable speed. Unstoppable power. Claws. Fangs. Death. Horrific thoughts ran across my mind as I raced through the undergrowth on steep, muddy terrain.
I had no idea where I was going or how long I had been running. Eventually I found myself stopped, exhausted, staring back in the direction I came. Scanning the forest, I watched for movement, but my vision tunneled. The trees and ground blurred together. Every brown branch looked like it could be the muscular leg of a mountain lion. But there was no movement, no sound. My mind raced.
I knew I needed to keep moving, but I’d lost my bearing. Where the hell am I? I turned to my left, the ground was precipitous and choked with bushes. I turned to my right...
There was the Volvon Cave, no more than 15 feet away.
A wild mix of emotions floored me. The Volvon Cave. My holy grail. After years of searching, I had just stumbled upon it during the most terrifying moment of my life. Still panicking, I couldn’t process the fact that I’d found it. It felt like a hallucination. I glanced dully at the cave entrance for a second before my instincts took over and told me to keep moving. I trudged a ways uphill until I found a high point out of the trees with a good line of sight where I could rest and figure out what to do.
I sat atop the ridge for a long time, processing what had just happened. Breathing. Rationalizing. The mountain lion was probably resting when I cornered it in its den. I got too close, it let out a defensive growl, maybe poked its head out of the cave just to make sure I was gone, then hopefully went back to sleep. I doubted it was actively prowling the area; if it wanted to attack me, I wouldn’t be sitting there thinking about it. Still, the mountain lion den was directly between me and the trail that led back to my car, and the terrain on either side was treacherous. I would have to pass the den again to get home safely.
But not before returning to the Volvon Cave. Obsession outweighed the fear.
Feeling ridiculously vulnerable, I picked up a decent sized rock; a sad potential means of self defense. Hollering every few seconds to ward off the cat, I ventured into the woods and back to the spot where I’d found the cave.
But it was gone. Pillars of sandstone rose from the ground, but they were devoid of caves. No. I spun around, looking in every direction, the forest spiraling around me, panic surging back into my veins. Where did it go?! Feeling somehow claustrophobic in the large forest, I retreated back up the hill to the high point.
Puzzled, I sat down again. The cave should have been right there. Had it been a mirage? My gaze wandered up the canyon through the dense green landscape I’d struggled across so many times before, the misty realm of my obsession. It was really testing me this time.
Gathering myself once more, I ventured back into the woods. Taking a different angle of approach brought me to a terrace between layers of steep exposed sandstone. And there it was; that familiar slanted roof, the tree with the “S” shaped trunk. The Volvon Cave, so perfectly tucked into the landscape, so easy to miss. It pained me to realize that on many of my previous searches, I had walked within fifty feet of the cave. I probably would have walked right by it again if it weren’t for the mountain lion.
Oh yeah, the mountain lion. I started hollering again as I approached the entrance to the cave. Fortunately it wasn’t too dark inside, and I could see clear to the back wall: there were no creatures inside. I took off my backpack, exhaled a deep breath, and entered the ancient cave.
Inside, I found myself surrounded by a natural canvas covered in red pigment. The air was thick and musty. There were no other footprints but my own. Careful not to touch anything or kick up any dust, I inspected the hundreds of pictograph elements throughout the shelter. In the center of the cave, on the most prominent panel of rock, were three designs: a rain symbol, an eyelash-shaped design, and an abstract cluster of circles and lines.The eyelash symbol was painted along the edge of an eye-shaped depression in the rock, making it look like a closed eye.
Beyond the main panel, there was an abundance of hash marks, squiggles, and "V" shaped elements, some of which traced the contours of the walls. Many of the designs were too faded to decipher, but the sheer number of them was impressive. The pictographs even appeared to continue below the sandy floor of the cave. Over hundreds of years, weathering of the sandstone walls had slowly added layer upon layer of sand to the floor of the cave, partially covering the designs closest to the earth. I wondered how deep the sand went, and how many more pictographs lurked below.
Over the years of rock art adventures, I’d grown accustomed to the thrill of discovery, the deep connection with the past, and the overwhelming sense of awe one experiences in a painted cave. But at the Volvon Cave, I felt only one thing: fear.
I couldn’t focus on the pictographs without thinking about what the mountain lion could have done to me, and I literally wasn’t out of the woods yet. I had one eye on the entrance of the cave, scanning for movement outside. My mind was elsewhere. I took a few pictures and left in a hurry.
Rock in hand, I began the tense, bushwhacking journey back towards the trail, sneaking by upslope of the big cat’s den. The cat was nowhere to be seen, but that was hardly any comfort: mountain lions are masters of stealth and ambush. Terrain passed by in a blur. Finally, relief washed over me as my feet hit the trail. With a deep exhale, I turned and looked back at the forest. Something had changed. It looked different than it had before, almost bizarre. There was no familiar feeling of hope for the next search. It was over.
After a two year search, the cave had become so much more to me than a cave. It was mystery itself. Shrouded in fog, hidden in some forgotten corner of a landscape drenched in myth, it captivated me endlessly. Yet even though I'd found it, the sense of mystery was still there, stronger than ever. I had set out to answer questions, and returned with a whole new set of questions. What did my experience mean? Would I ever return? How on earth did my desperate sprint lead me to the exact location of the cave?
Was the mountain lion a guard or a guide?
I hiked back to my car, rolled down the windows, and floored it down the old country road, howling at the top of my lungs.
Months later, the mountain lion still stalks me. It hides in the dark nooks of my garage, waiting for me to get home. It follows me on walks. It's everywhere, lurking around every corner, the unseen beast, the gruesome what-could-have-been. That awful growl reverberates in my head, sending chills through my body. The terror lingers.
Still, I often revisit the southeastern shadow of Mount Diablo in my head. I drift uphill through the dense oak forest, past towers of sandstone. It's so quiet. I take the last few sandy steps to the mouth of the cave and stop there, transfixed. But it's not the Volvon Cave. It's the other cave. The cave I wasn't looking for.
The black maw where I unknowingly stared face-to-face with the mountain lion.
Footnotes:
Rock art sites are sacred places. Please respect any rock art you encounter, do not touch, do not share unpublished locations, and leave no trace.