Sloth Canyon is not the name of the is location however I called it this because in the ancient times this area was dominant with sloths. Little does everybody know that this area at one time had water, trees and life. Now all that remains is the cave, dry fauna, dunes and desert. 

To get to this area you have to take a hidden road which trust me you can get stuck on without the know how of driving on it. At times the walls get very narrow but it eventually opens up to a large canyon area. Not to far away is a bombing range for the US Airforce. It seems to also be an area where alot of people go to party. I noticed alot of beer bottles, spray painted rocks and even a cross in the desert. We will do a second investigation and that will be the cave itself as we are still in the middle of our research:) I just wanted to give you some history and photos of what to expect of this area. Of course it might be an entirely separate location  since I was a little off on the coordinates. 

The area rather the cave dates back to about 8500 BC and at one time the bones of a ground sloth and camel were found. Also what was found is man made fire pits, dart shafts, basket fragments and signs that the cavern was inhibited by man. The sloths are basically much like a bear just with longer legs and a larger more slender body.

I worked fairly hard at this investigation it really was only my second night hike in the desert. If you are caught back here with a vehicle it is a 100,000 dollar fine they do not want others back here. Not sure why but it is Indian land and they are trying to preserve it. Of course the cave itself is public and land. 

It was excavated in the 1930s by an archaeologist named Mark Harrington and paleontologist James Thurston.  In 1957 the bones found here and Caltech's entire vertebrate paleontology collection were sold to the Los Angeles County Museum where they have sit today. The bones that were found were laid out in a pattern above the human artifacts. Which means that the Clovis Indian Hunters perhaps killed the animals then buried such bones. The four species of animals found in the area were camels, horses, mountain sheep's, and the ground Sloth.

Some of the bones were charred others had fractures or grooves in the bones. I never did find the cave I was in the area of it and may have seen it off in the distance. I might return just to get a nice hike in maybe even a day hike out here. Alot of people visit the cave but where I went was beyond the cave in a remote area where I could get a taste of what the desert is all about.

At one time this area had an ice age when that water began to thaw some lakes were formed this explains why horses were running wild at one time in this area.  If anything the area at night gets an perfect 10 for creepiness. The thing about this area of Las Vegas is that out in the desert alot of bombs were tested. Rumors of aliens, strange craft and even creatures are told. I personally always keep an openmind its not an easy place to hike around at during the night very poor visibility....rough terrain....rocky roads etc.

© By

Lord Rick

The rewards of a hard earned investigation lol

Gypsum Cave

 It is called Gypsum Cave and was inhabited once by ancient ground sloths, then by ancient men.

The cave contains six rooms and is a total of 300 feet long and 120 feet wide. When it was excavated in 1930-1931 archeologists found a mixture of human and animal artifacts. Inside the dry and dusty cavern they came across dung and also a skull, backbone, nine to twelve inch claws, and reddish-brown hair of the extinct ground sloth. This bear-sized Shasta ground sloth became extinct around 9000 years ago. The dung was radiocarbon dated to about 8,500 BC which was about the same as what the tools found here dated. The people that lived here though were not thought to have moved in till about 3000 BC when the sloths moved out. Painted dart shafts, torches, stone points, and yucca fiber string were some of the tools found in Gypsum Cave. Other bones, of prehistoric horses and camels were also excavated in the cave.

The most interesting information from this site would have to be the ancient dung from the sloths. The caramelized feces has given information about what the environment and vegetation of the area was because the sloth was a herbivore. This ancient plant eater survived on capers, mustards, lilies, grasses and surprisingly grapes. Grapes normally grow near water; lakes, rivers, and such. This is unusual for the arid desert of Nevada, but this was also a time of ice ages which caused lakes and ponds to form. Even so, the geology of the area indicates that the nearest water source was six to twelve miles away. That’s quite a distance, even for a giant sloth.

This site gives an insight on using DNA recovered from ancient feces to find out more about ancient times. This can be used not only in Gypsum Cave for giant sloths, but also for any prehistoric beings.

Sources http://dcnr.nv.gov/ Sloth

Gypsum Cave 

Gypsum Cave is a five-room limestone cave in Sunrise Mountain, approximately 12 miles east of Las Vegas. For a twelve-month period, between January 1930 and 1931, noted early archaeologist Mark R. Harrington (1882-1971) and a small crew of Native Americans dug through most of the cave’s deposit. Harrington was interested in the cave for its potential to provide evidence of a period in the distant past when it was occupied by both humans and now-extinct mammals, especially the ground sloth (Nothrotheriops shastense).  Gypsum Cave is significant because it yields artifacts related to early human occupation and information about the region’s ancient ecosystem. It is also important to the early history of North American archaeology.

Harrington did not have the benefit of radiocarbon dating or the bank of regional information that now exists concerning the various kinds of prehistoric material he was unearthing. What he did have was a field approach that emphasized stratigraphic relationships and an analytical approach that was interdisciplinary. These approaches, which were cutting-edge compared to the work of many of his contemporaries, became standard practice with the rise of New Archaeology in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Harrington’s excavation yielded an extraordinary collection of terminal-Pleistocene paleontological and Holocene archaeological specimens. In different places within the cave, he found hand-carved wooden foreshafts from dart/atlatl weapons and dark lenses, which he interpreted as the remains of hearths, below a layer of sloth dung. Harrington presented the “many finds, scattered about the cave under widely varying conditions” as evidence that Pleistocene megafauna and Ice Age humans were contemporaneous. This evidence met with immediate skepticism from a number of his peers and generated much debate in the decades that followed.  It also spurred research to recover comparable evidence elsewhere, such as at nearby Tule Springs.

The paleontological and artifact assemblages from Gypsum Cave were studied anew with the advent of radiocarbon dating.  This method placed sloth dung from the cave from about 8,500 to 10,500 BP (before present, a scientific time scale).  With improved techniques, subsequent radiocarbon dates have extended the presence of sloths in the cave deeper into the past, on the order of 20,000 to 33,000 years BP.

In contrast, most human artifacts are much younger. In the 1960s, researchers obtained radiocarbon dates of 2,400 years BP for sticks from one of the purported hearths and 2,900 years BP on a dart shaft fragment, both of which Harrington had allegedly recovered from beneath a layer of sloth dung. Recent radiocarbon dates on nine other cane and wooden dart fragments from a variety of rooms and stratigraphic contexts fall narrowly between about 3,300 and 4,250 years BP, establishing Harrington’s “Gypsum Culture” assemblage as 3,000 to 4,500 years BP. The oldest implement now documented from the cave is a fragment of a 9,280-year-old basket found in a crevice in Room 3. It is among the oldest pieces of basketry ever found in North America, and its weave is unlike that of other basketry traditions documented in the region. 
    
In 2004, D. Craig Young and Amy Gilreath re-inspected and reanalyzed a deep stratigraphic exposure in Room 1, reaching three conclusions. First, Harrington’s sloth dung layer and the strata immediately above and below it were really one layer, lacked cultural material, and yielded radiocarbon dates of 11,060 to 11,490 years BP. This is roughly the period when the ground sloth became extinct.  Second, a dark lens identified by Harrington as “Fireplace 2” appeared instead to be some type of residue from something such as mold or decomposition of sloth dung rather than charcoal in a fire-pit. Finally, the quantity and size of rock that comprised most of the deposit left large crevices and gaps. Secondary gypsum deposits have since formed, draped like a sheet through the rocky matrix and preventing these cavities from filling-in. Packrats had scurried through this three-dimensional natural maze, dragging their treasures through the deposits. Neither Harrington nor his paleontologist, Chester Stock, had recognized this source of mixing, thinking instead that there were cultural materials both above and below the sloth layers, and thus falsely concluding that people and ground sloths occupied the cave at roughly the same time.

Gypsum Cave will, no doubt, continue to enlarge our understanding of the natural and cultural history of the American West in the years ahead and serves as an important site for continued scientific work.  The cave is likewise a significant site to local Native American people, and it should be respected as such and not disturbed.