The paintings are inside a tall cave on a rocky hillside in Wishram, Wash. Four humanlike figures were painted in red hundreds or even thousands of years ago. And that's not all.
"There's actually a very complex picture on this wall. You can see little elements of it over here in a different color," says Mike Taylor, an amateur archaeologist who helped write a book on Columbia River rock art. He says for generations, Northwest tribes have used this place for vision quests and other spiritual ceremonies. They still do. In fact, it's so sensitive, the nearby Yakama Nation declined to speak on tape about this cave. Taylor says it's rare to find one still intact.
"In the rest of the world, a lot of people know about the painted caves in France and Spain, which were painted 15,000 to 30,000 years ago. To us here, this is about as close as we get from an archaeological perspective to anything like that," he says.
