There are dozens of petroglyph sites across the 110,000 acres of the Volcanic Tableland, a few miles north of Bishop, and three have become sufficiently well known for the BLM to install signs and trailhead parking. All are located along the same road, the unpaved Fish Slough Road, a good, wide route, a little bumpy in places, but usually suitable for all vehicles. The petroglyphs are etched onto the weathered, richly-colored, reddish-brown surfaces of outcrops and boulders of ignimbrite, a type of tuff, formed, like all of the tableland, by eruptions from the Long Valley Caldera around 765,000 years ago.

The sites are of interest not just for the rock art, with very numerous petroglyphs on some of the rock faces, but also because of the unusual, eroded forms of many of the rocks, especially photogenic when viewed against the great peaks of the White Mountains to the east and Sierra Nevada to the west. The three locations, Fish Slough, Chidago Canyon and Red Canyon, become larger and better to the north, and they may be seen by a drive of 20 miles, starting along US 6. The first (southernmost) two are fairly small, explorable in 20-30 minutes, while the latter is rather larger, and an hour or more could be spent here.