Earth Spirit Preserve is Truman and Sheryl Bernal, a husband and wife team. We travel extensively throughout Northern California and Nevada and into Oregon and Washington, locating, recording, photographing, and documenting petroglyphs of the North American Indian and any others we find. We learn of many of these sites from farmers, ranchers, hunters, fishermen, back packers and even from the petroglyphs themselves.

No chalk is ever used to inhance the petroglyphs before photographing. Chalking in a petroglyph is a common practice among Anthropologists, Archaeologists, and Photographers both amature and professional. We believe that chalk helps to destroy the petroglyphs themselves.

Sheryl uses camcorders to video tape the overall petroglyph site as well as the petroglyphs. She records the topography, location of the petroglyphs, any rock rings (house or hunting rings) rock walls or caves. She also audiotapes all the information source, climatic information and possible tribe, nation or other origan.

These tapes are gone over many times when we get home to pick out anything we may have missed while we were at the site. Many of the sites are miles from any roads or even trails except for game trails.

I use a digital camera and two 35mm manual cameras with three different lenses to photograph the petroglyphs themselves. No flash or artifical light is used except in some very rare underground cases. This means that a site may need to be visited several times in one day or over several days to catch the proper light. some of the sites are revisited with each solstice and equinox to catch them at the time of the year they were intended to be seen by a traveler if that was their intent. In this way the optimum clearity of the of the petroglyph is obtained in the photograph.

Not all petroglyphs photograph well, but all petroglyphs need to be recorded on film as they are being destroyed. Climatic changes, air polution, and vandalism are taking their toll on the petroglyphs. Some at an alarming rate. At one site we visited in the fall and returned to it the following spring, some of the petroglyphs were completely gone due to vandalism. Graffiti and target practice seems to be the two worse forms of distruction.