It's the pits!

Well, this is very late in coming but I really need to thank a lot of people for two amazing weeks in the hot sun at the edge of an arroyo with mosquitoes and gnats and being covered in ashy sand. It sounds awful but it was one of three events in my life that have been the most incredible times I have ever had. So, Gary thank you for you thoughtfulness in telling me about the Archaeology class and getting the gears moving, Barbara at Ghost Ranch for slipping me into the Archaeology program at last minute and the scholarship that without I'd not been able to afford to go. Barbara, you are a sweet sweet woman, John the Crew Leader for being such an great and interesting leader who's a treasure of knowledge and wonderful stories, again Gary for pushing my application through. And most of all Mark who held down the fort at home and did everything that normally we both do in a day, even when he was in terrible pain. Your hard work, patience, and thoughtfulness are acknowledged and deeply appreciated.

First please understand that this story is in amateur words. It is very technical work and I am not about to act like a pro.



The story ... Ghost Ranch is a dream for a geologist, paleontologist, or archaeologist, anthropologist, botanist, and yes, tourist, because of it's incredible amount of the geological activity over millions of years and the fact that it has been scoured away by erosion exposing many layers of soil and rock deposits creating a beautiful display of formations and scenery seen for miles away. It has many areas they know of and are sure many not found of dinosaur bone deposits. A dinosaur and the state fossil, Coelophysis from the Triassic period has been found in abundance there. A recent discovery at the ranch turned up a new species that may be cause for rewriting history of the period. And lastly ancient human activity. Ghost Ranch has many known sites and more to be discovered of ancient native cultures. And there is where I jump into the story.

All of the attendees of the class from as far away as Boston and California, were given the choice to work on one of two sites and/or work in the lab. The first site was deep in an arroyo drainage against a cliff face and many artifacts have been found there. The other site was across the ranch and at the base of a smaller ridge that was out in the open and not a whole lot has been found there yet. Wanting to dive in head first (what's new there) I chose the first site. For the sake of security to these sites I will not be giving any details of the location to protect the site from looting that is very prominent here. Our team was made up of about seven people, most of which were people who've come back each year because they love it so much. I think there were only two of us who were totally new to actual digging. We were led by John Hayden. John has had years of service with the Forestry Service and is now retired from there. However, the man never stops. His love for the region and digging keep him very active. He is an enclyopedia when it comes to soils, plants, native cultures, and history. And he is one of those people who are just plain great. He certainly has my admiration. And I wish I had his devotion to this project and his drive and energy!

The first thing we had to do was set up the site with tarps for shade from the intense heat coming down on us from above and off the cliff face. Then a bunch of equipment had to be dropped in by rope about 40 feet or walked around on a trail that was just a little too long to carry things in. After that John assigned us grids to begin working on. I was place on a grid with the other new man and next to an experienced man so he could watch over us and give us some direction. The whole process of excavating a grid is at times very tedious and time consuming. Record keeping alone is very involved and needs to be to make sense of what is being discovered at the site and how it all comes together after many seasons of digging. After finding something of interest we took a photo of the item where it lay, recorded it on our grid map, wrote a description, wrapped it, bagged it, then logged it into the field record book. Sometimes after hours in the heat writing gets hard and sloppy, memory stops working, and you just want out of the pit and into a cool shower!

We found some really cool artifacts. The most was bone fragments. The site is assumed to be an over night or hunting camp. Multiple "thermal features" (fire pits) sites have been found and bones have been cracked open to scrape out the marrow, a great source of protein. We found a few pottery fragments and several points (a.k.a. arrow heads) and point fragments. The site was also littered with fragments of chert a cousin to flint I believe, and stone tools as well. The chert pieces we found where mainly from Cerro Perdenal several hours journey by foot. But there were also fragments from miles and miles away. I think I was the one (not sure) that found a shell bead. A shell from the Pacific. These people migrated hundreds of miles annually to trade, hunt, and survive.

Layer by layer, centimeter by centimeter we scraped our trowels through the ashy sand in sometimes broiling heat. The tarps protected up from the direct sun but the cliff face heated up and man did it radiate the heat. One morning when we arrived at the site I was climbing down into the arroyo and I could feel the rock face still pushing out heat from the day before. The days were sometimes long an tedious but geez when something cool was found my heart picked up and my excitement reminded me what this time was all about.

The program itself was in two parts, work at the site from 8am until 3, 4, or 5pm depending on our discoveries and sometimes our excitement. Then we had lectures by some very well experienced and educated people and a talk about the days discoveries with the other team at site two. That went from 7pm until ... well, when my body said enough! I'd race home between the dig and the class to grab food and race out. Thankfully, I was fortunate enough to drive the 7 miles home each day to collapse in my own bed. There were a couple days where I was about to quit just because of the grueling heat and body pain from kneeling, leaning down into the pit as it deepened, or laying on my belly to reach the next layer. But like most of the time, by morning I was reaching for a stable object to pull myself out of bed, get strong tea in me, pack a lunch, and head back excited to find more discoveries.

At the end of the dig each year all the equipment gets packed away ... now it's time to pull it out and load it up in the trucks.


You see all the backsides because just in front of them is the cliff that drops to arroyo and dig site.


Down they climb onto the site.


Most of our heavier supplies and equipment had to be dropped down by rope


And our shelter from the direct sun begins to go up


Yup, time to get dirty. My guide Craig from Boston has been at this awhile. He will over see me for the first week.


I am nervous as heck! I am so afraid I'll ruin evidence or destroy an artifact. My nervousness slipped away pretty fast.


Measure once, measure twice and just for kicks measure three times. Each item is marked on the grid map. Measuring correctly and actuarately means that back in the lab all the data can be combed through without guessing. I think it was a compliment that John said he approved of my attention to detail. The mapping and sketching was very fun.


No! I am not sleeping on the job! The pit was on a slope and I happened to get the high side. So as we dug deeper my side deepened fatser. Laying on my belly was the only way I could reach. Yeah, Yeah, that's my bald head.


This was one of the coolest times in my life! I hunted for points or tools many many times by myself and with my grandpa. Not once did I ever find one bit of anything. I broke my record the second day when I found this beautiful transparent obsidian bird point. I'll admit my head swelled just a bit that day. It sure as heck pushed me onwards!


Look close at the paper towel and you can see a small rodent jaw I found deep in the pit. More than likely he died in an old filled in burrow. There was no evidence of him being cooked or burned.


So here's where you can go crazy in the heat. In my hand is a bird bone, many chert flakes and a couple bone fragments. Each one has to be measured where it's found, place in an envelope with all the details of where it was found, then logged into the field book. I think it takes more time to log than it did to scrape a centimeter of soil all day.


This was a super find of mine. This is an atlatl point. You can Google to get the details. It hopefully will be of some help to sort out the site's age. This point was attached to a long fletched stick. The stick was then thrown by a notched stick. It was a powerul and deadly weapon in the right hands.


Maybe you've seen this before. This plate with letters and numbers and directional marker maps the pits depth and location as well as the spot where artifacts might have been found.


This is without a doubt the coolest find. Sadly I have to say it wasn't mine. What you see is a hammer stone in the man's hand and large bone fragemts sitting on top of a work stone. They were cracking bones for the marrow. The women on our team uncovered this great find just exactly as the cook left it hundreds of year ago! In situ! Some one must have left this camp in a hurry and didn't bother to do the dishes!


So, I could show dozens of more photo's but they get pretty monotanous. I went away from this feeling like I had experienced a once in a lifetime event. I am a very lucky man to have had this chance to dig into history. When I think about it five months later I am sort of taken back that I did it! My love for this region and the Native history has always been strong. This dig made me realize that I have only barely scratch the surface of what is available to me here. There a many many new experiences and adventures in this beautiful "land of enchantment". That's a pretty fitting name for this state as far as I am concerned! Now .... onto my next big adventure!

Summer pace

Yes, again I have to give you all kinds of excuses for not blogging as much as I did on my blog in Colorado. This Spring and Summer have been like one of those big Spring thunderstorms that I love so much passing through full of intense energy, dropping tons of fresh water the plants use as energy, big bolts of lightning striking every now and then causing my adrenaline to rise and pulse to quicken, and refreshing everything as the storm passes. It seems that as soon as I get out of bed and the coffee kicks in I hit the ground running! And thank goodness someone was thinking when they brought the custom of a siesta to this area! When the heat in the afternoon reaches a peak I can't describe what it's like to retreat into the embrace of a cool adobe house, take a shower, and relax and catch my breath, and maybe nap a few minutes. It's a good time to revive!

We have been so very busy with a million projects. It seems that both me and Mark have this little problem keeping of priority list straight and the list just grows like the obnoxious Russian Thistles we are cursed with. You pull one and find ten more growing in it's shadow!

So much has happened and of course I'll say it again, I have a million photos to select from my collection to share .... and I haven't found or made time to do it. That relaxing work is pretty darned low on that list of priorities! LOL!

The pullets where moved in with the older laying hens, some roosters where sent packing to our friend's farm in Abiquiu, and the turkeys are growing amazingly fast. We've taken time out for a couple special events in the community like feasts which have been a great addition to our learning experiences of the rich diversity of culture here. We've made a couple more friends and hopefully we'll be adding more. I am always excited to meet another craftsman or artist and they seem to be thick as fleas here!

Our two largest and most intense projects are grass growing and garden developement. Mark has been crazily obsessed with covering all the patches of dirt in the yard. When I came here there was more clay showing than grass. I have been helping him get our clay soils amended with huge amounts of manure, compost, and clay buster and then put in the bunches of wildflowers we grew from seed and the too many plants we got from the local nurseries. We are trying to use alll native plants but it sometime limits the color in a bed so we occassionally use non-native plants for that.

I was given a wonderful chance to be invlved in an Archaeological dig at Ghost Ranch. Our friend Gary Salazar who's a manager at the ranch told me of the class. He also pushed through a scholarship for me to take the class for free! The class is in two parts and the scholarship paid for both sessions! They would have cost me over $1,000.00 if I had to pay for them. I have finished week one and I am not sharing yet all that has happened. This is a tease but it's an exciting story so far! I am having a total blast! I am working in the story right now. Week two starts for me tomorrow, Tuesday, and goes through Saturday.

That's a very quick summer update. Hopefully more will be added to the blog soon!
I hope you all are having a great summer!
Barry

Poults!

So do you know what a poult is?

Well, any self respecting person that lives in the country and enjoys animals as much as I do has to have a turkey or two! Three weeks ago I picked up five Rio Grande Turkey poults. (poults are turkey chicks) We are hoping there there to be males and females in the group so we can have a breeding group. We'd like to eventually have enough that we can release them into our surrounding pastures. We'll see about that dream though. We have a good number of birds of prey in the area that may stop us from releasing any turkeys. This turkey breed is a subspecies of eastern and western breeds and is native to northeast New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. This habitat we live in here is perfect for them as they like open arid areas near rivers and large trees for roosting and we have all of that.

And here they are at nearly two weeks




Here is the adult Tom in full glory. I guess you can see why we wanted to raise them!

Cerro Pedernal

Standing 9,862 feet above sea level in the Jemez mountain range this is a major landmark in north-central New Mexico and just up the road from us. You can see this beautiful formation for miles before you ever get to it. The word "pedernal" is "flint" in Spanish. There are many colors of flint on this mountain and the natives gathered it there and used it for arrowheads and many tools. And it is still considered a very special place to them. The tower is a basalt shaft from a volcano left after eons of erosion worked on it's sides of softer rock.

Georgia O'keeffe painted it, called it her own, and her ashes were scattered there. She said "God told her that if she painted it often enough she could have it" and Cerro Pedernal is in over a dozen of her paintings. She also had a cassita at Ghost Ranch that had a view of the butte.. Many others have done what she did in painting it like my friend in Colorado who is a native Navajo from New Mexico, Al Livingston. His borrowed painting of Abiquiu Lake with Pedernal dominating the background hung in my house in Calhan, CO. This past December I was very excited when I saw Pedernal for the first time knowing I had the painting on my wall.

We can't see this very special butte from our house because we are so deep in the Rio Chama valley and the mountains to our south block the view. But crossing the road and walking just up the forest service road or driving home from Abiqui you can see it loom in the distance.

Here are just two shots of what we can see from the entrance to Copper Canyon. I will for sure be sharing many more pictures of this feature that dominate the skyline here. The hard part is being at the right spot at the right time. It seems that since I have been here it is usually very hazy or cloudy around the butte and the pictures haven't been very crisp.

Canyon del Cobres

I thought the canyon got it's name from the beautiful sandstones that have copper or yellow tones to them. However it was named because of four Spanish copper mines that were worked years ago. We have yet to find them. The canyon and this entire area were formed by a series of huge volcanic eruptions and flows and then years of erosion and upheaval. This entire region is made up of the Valles Caldera. The last recorded flow was 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. There were two caldera forming eruptions that took place 1.4 to 1.1 million years ago.

As you can tell from my previous pictures we are surrounded by fairly tall mountains and cliffs. But if you'd Google map this area you'd see just how large the caldera and impact of the explosion was. I am told that debris from the eruption can be found in substantial layers of soil as far as the Mississippi River.

Two weeks ago after Mark finally got me convinced to get outside and hike we headed up the arroyo behind our house. This is just one of several that drains the canyon. I was like a kid in a candy store looking at formations, pebbles, boulders, and the amazing array of colors in the sandstone deposits. I wish I was a geologist because we found a slew of different types of rocks and pebbles. There were flints, lava, mica, conglomerates, many different colors of quarts, of course sandstones, and a ton of others that we didn't know.

I always wanted to live in "Red Rock country" but I am very happy to live in an area that is so much more colorful. The pictures that Mark and I took can't begin to capture the colors, the beauty, or the scale. We took a hundred shots that day between us. It's very hard to pick just a few to share with you.

It all starts with some soils, some water, some wind, and of course a few million years!


Now can you see why I am not too upset that I don't live in the red rocks?




These lava formations were really amazing. Some looked like a sci-fi creature because of the erosion on them






In the distance is the red rock knife edge that has been in a couple other postings.


We have the biggest ravens I have ever seen. They have always intrigued me. This one decided to tag along with us for a short time.


Me on some of the yellow sandstone.


One of two dry waterfalls that become rushing torrents after a good rain. The erosion makes a beatiful place.






This is a nice red rock formation in the midst of other colors.


More beautiful colors.


Erosion can turn out some pretty suggestive forms. Or am I being bad?


I caught the indirect sunlight lighting up this cliff late in the day. This picture has not been touched up! This is the true color!


Our walk down the arroyo to home


That's it for this blog. In the next few days I will show you another set of cool views from this trip. But I want to focus on the subject matter a bit more.

Additions

I have always enjoyed going to hardware and feed stores. There is something that takes me back to being a kid and my grandpa making a big deal out of me going to one of them with him. I was always taken to the feed store to pick out chicks each Spring. I almost always was allowed to pick out a couple chicks that were of the more uncommon breeds to add to the flock and more than not they were of a Banty breed. His flocks consisted of egg laying and meat birds. More often than not he had Rhose Island Red, Dominique, Buff Orpington, and Leghorn. I usually had one or two banty roosters that I called "mine" but they were usually so full of themselves they'd send me running from the coop or yard. When I turned 17 I left the farm and began my life as a big city dweller and pushed on through life. Now I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world to live a live back in the country. This isn't a farm we live on by any stretch but it's quite rural and has lots of room for animals. Of course a place wouldn't be home to me without chickens. Four weeks ago I brought home the Cuckoo Marans. This week when I went to the feed store they had Americaunas. Those are the chickens that lay the blue green eggs. If you followed my old blog you know that I already have some Americauna hens, and some pullets that are suppose to be the same. But since the pullets have matured more it's clear that I was sold a bill of goods. So I called Mark from the feed store and respectively made sure it was OK to bring some chicks home. That man really needs to learn that I shouldn't be allowed to go to the feed store alone!!! LOL! Anyway, I came home with 15 Americauna chicks last week. We have lost one that was a little weak since I got them home. The rest of the lot are doing quite nice. Here are some pictures to share with you.

Spring

I guess it doesn't take a whole lotta sense to figure out when Spring arrives. I am sure that all of you are enjoying it in some way or another. Hopefully all of you have been able to get out and really take it all in. For me in this new environment of New Mexico it feels like Mother Nature just cranked up the volume on my senses. Of course there were signs a few weeks ago. The twigs of the willow trees are yellowed up and the reds were really becoming pronounced on the Coyote Willow along the river and asequias. The willow trees were first to leaf out and now our elms are doing the same. the The grass seed that Mark has so diligently planted and cared for like a new born began sprouting and the few spots that it was established began to grow. The chickens started giving us a few more eggs daily. The snow has nearly all melted on the mountains near us. Our native wildflower seeds have sprouted in the many flats we have going. The eight varieties of heirloom tomatoes have shot up and we just repotted them. The lettuces, carrots, spinach, and radishes have finally broken ground. Of course the Cuckoo Maran chicks came home with me four weeks ago are a really flourishing. My cactus collection is greening up and small flower buds are developing on some of them. This week the gate was opened on the asequia and we can now listen to a quite rush of water twenty four hours a day. But what really made a difference was a weekend of occasional rains. Mostly at night, but it was slow and gentle. This morning I went out to check on the Cuckoo chicks, open up the coop door for the big chickens, and throw grains like I do each morning and my nose went into overdrive with the smells of spring. The deep rich smell of the soil was most prominent in the air. I think if you are a gardener like me you begin to develop a nose for soils over the years. The soil in Georgia that I gardened in had a mild scent. The soil in Colorado had a hard woody scent. The soil here has a deep rich sandy, loamy scent. (I know some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking I now should be committed) There is a very mild scent of sage and juniper in the air too. When the sun warms it more I am very sure that I'll be enjoying that deep scent that reminds me of this region. I have had a love for this region since childhood and I am about as happy as can be knowing that I am finally experiencing life and culture here.