About this same time, he was reading in the journal of Major john Wesley Powell, and Bob says an off the cuff comment from the Major got him started putting the pieces together...

While on one of his later surveying expeditions on the Arizona Strip, Powell took "a very old Indian" guide.  Powell mentions specifically how, from time to time, their guide would leave the group, ascend some butte or bluff, scout around for a while looking at the ground and then the horizon, come back and announce simply "we travel this way to find water".  Powell, jokingly, wrote that "perhaps he goes up to talk to the rocks"

But Bob knew that water was no joking matter on The Strip.  This Indian guide was clearly able, while traveling in territory he had never seen, to find water.

Bob wondered if perhaps Powell's guide wasn't "talking" to the rocks, but perhaps he was "reading" them. Bob started comparing mental notes and photographs he had taken over the years at several hundred sites and he found a pattern.

To help expand the theory he recruited the help of Dixon Spendlove, another amateur archaeologist in the area. Dixon knew of several similar glyphs on other sites and together they began a systematic survey, photographing, cataloging and mapping glyphs and the locations they pointed to.

The system they have discovered is nothing short of incredible.  At each location of a glyph, there will be an indicated direction or directions (sometimes there are more than one glyph on a site ) to travel to be sure to encounter water, either at a spring, a water pocket cache or another settlement.  When that destination is reached, there are more glyphs on a nearby ridge (usually very close, sometimes right on top), indicating where to travel next.

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