Thanksgiving Trip

So 29 people have visited here before I've gotten around to posting anything. The blog title is true enough. I have a couple history papers to write and that has driven me here to put it off. I do put the pro in procrastinate.

We went to my sister's place in New Mexico over Thanksgiving. She lives near a huge, lone mountain (an extinct volcano) that arises out of the sagebrush flats of the lower San Luis Valley. The mountain had been part of a private ranch but has recently been acquired by the state. I found out about this last year when I was in Iraq and became obsessed with exploring this wild and little visited chunk of real estate. We went there right after I got home but I didn't make it far up the mountain. I was physically drained from my tour and needed a few months to recover.

Back home I read everything I could find on the place and came upon a site that quoted a BLM archaeologist saying that the location had never been surveyed for cultural materials, (man made stuff) and there might be Indian atrtifacts, petroglyphs, Spanish colonial stuff, remnants of the early ranching days. My brother-in-law has a story about a medicine wheel near the summit. Well cool, next obsession.

The next visit would be a full-out expedition to locate and record (digital images and GPS coordinates) cultural materials on or in the vicinity of Ute Mountain, Taos County, New Mexico.

I created extensive packing lists for me and my son: iron rations, inclement weather gear, duplicate navigation aids, emergency stove, emergency shelter, 18 mile radios (with weather alert feature) for comms with base camp, water load-out tailored to activity and climatological data, first aid kit tailored to activity (SAM splints, analgesics, moleskin), and the full topographical package stored in the GPS with back-up hard copies. Oh, and a big-assed horse pistol because the bears are aggressively in their pre-hibernation feeding mode at that time and my son is small enough to be in the size-equals-prey matrix for the mountain lions that are known to live there. Like to view my wildlife from the outside...not the inside.

And we went and did it. We covered about a quarter of the south face. Up through the sage, yucca, prickly pear level to the pinon ( supply your own tilde over the 'n') pine and sideoats grama. They say the summit (10,000' +) is in the Canadian Zone with firs and such but that is another trip.

Artifacts? We found a fresh Bud Light can at our turnaround point. That was it.

And I don't wonder. The terrain is uniformly dry, trail-less and steep. Every step is on a loose rock. The mountain's bones are fractured and ready to drop stone on you by the ton if you try a scramble. No reason for anyone to go up there much. Except that one elk hunter who left a beer can stuck in a crevasse in the rock. (I don't usually dignify anyone who mixes firearms and alcohol with the appellation of hunter but for clarity's sake...) It was at a place where a person would wait to bag an elk.

Anyway, next time we will try the summit from the north face and see if we can find a ceremonial site. I have been by the anthropology department to see about medicine wheels and there are many types. Some of them would be hard to recognize if you hadn't seen examples. Also, there might be some signs of habitations or subsistance activities around the base of the mountain, but much of that will key on the availability of water. Haven't heard of any permanent water but there must be some tanks or seeps somewhere. The Rio Grande is close in horizontal terms, but runs in the bottom of a rather deep, if not spectacular, gorge.

Done with this for now. Got to go work on that degree.