Sometimes I think I take just a few too many pictures of my cats, but this glyph in the Rinconada Canyon at Petroglyph National Monument makes me think a kindred spirit once roamed these hills. Templeton thought it might be an image made of him, but I thought no since he was far too young. He said in human years yes but in cat years no. I don’t think that’s how it works, but on the other hand …
Another foggy morning at Ridgefield, a gap in the fog momentarily opened where the sun was about to rise, so the orange colors of the sunrise were surrounded by the gray fog. I pulled the levels down towards black instead of gray — it didn’t look like this in person, but it emphasizes what made me take the picture: the sunrise struggling to escape from the prison of the fog.
While in Taos, my wife and I drove out to the Wild Rivers Recreation Area for a little hiking and sight seeing. My wife wanted to touch the Rio Grande so after waiting for some thunderstorms to pass through, we hiked the Little Arsenic Trail down into the Rio Grande Gorge.
Following a long and seemingly endless series of switchbacks down into the canyon, we were tired but happy when we finally reached the riverbank. The trees by the water had a beautiful red color and I loved the patterns in their bark.
The hike back up was even more punishing, but I was excited to find a tarantula sharing the trail with us, the first one I’ve seen in the wild.
No one is quite certain why the ancestral Pueblos eventually moved elsewhere, but my theory is that when they carved their media centers into the rock, they left room for their standard-definition televisions. When high-definition sets swept the Southwest, there was no room to expand to accomodate the wider TV’s and they were forced to move away and begin their carvings anew.
It’s just a theory.
The little round holes that you see are where log poles would attach small buildings to the cliff dwellings. Most of those buildings no longer exist but the rooms carved into the cliffs remain.
When we visited Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, I was struck how the carved rooms at the bottom of the cliff resembled the natural holes that run all the way up the cliff face. These rooms were at the edge of the main area and were extremely small.
Perhaps this is where misbehaving husbands were sent to spend the night, the ancestral Pueblo’s equivalent of being condemned to sleep on the couch.
We visited many wonderful places during a weeklong trip to New Mexico and Bandelier was easily one of my favorites, a nice mix of human and natural history.