It’s much too hot to hike in the desert. We’re hiding out, like this mouse.
There is a mouse. I promise.
Find the mouse:
I mean it. There’s a mouse in there.
Hint: Look for the invisible but hopeful thought balloon that reads, “You are mistaken. There is no mouse.”
Another hint: The mouse is about the size of a pecan.
Mouse!
On one five mile hike, about twenty metates. Most were the simple Archaic type, but did even the Ancestral Pueblo use that casual style when hunting and traveling light? The materials were always to hand.
Nine of them:
Also one Ancestral Pueblo type, broken. So often metates are broken. Were they perhaps broken ritually to mark some event?
Lately the temperature has been perfectly reptilian.
On a sandy mesa-side, Hosteen Cheii. Proper behavior is to give him water; if you don’t have water, use spit.
And cooling it in the shade of a juniper, a pretty prairie rattler. Proper behavior is to back off in a hurry.
…a Giant Sequoia.
In the sand of an arroyo, roadrunner on the left—all those little Xs—coyote on the right.
See July 5 post. What are they?
Like the circle in the earlier post, this one was in the wrong place and with the wrong doorway opening to be a hogan ring. Its lichened stones were next to the collapsed foundations of a Puebloan fieldhouse, ca. 1300s (my best guess; post-Chaco). But it didn’t have the sunken center typical of a kiva depression, and seemed too small for that as well.
Beautiful potsherds.
Remember to turn potsherds face down again to protect the paint.
Still too hot for more than a short hike, but there had been rain; there’s hope for a cooler season. The gaiters need mending:
…but—next to the fallen foundation of a Navajo hogan—that old blue enamel coffee pot may be beyond repair.
Not Navajo. Often a stone circle is the foundation of a traditional hogan, but this is in the wrong place–over a lava field, no grazing near–and the “doorway” break faces west, not east.
Puebloan? There are tumbled Ancestral Puebloan structures in the neighborhood, but they’re all square-cornered. Nor can it be a kiva, because it was built right on the sandstone slabs.
The fallen ponderosa that divides it neatly in half is old, but thick lichen says the circle is much, much older.
What was it?
I’m not great at identifying projectile points, but my best guess is that this is an Armijo point (Late Archaic, about 2,000 B.C.) and an atlatl point rather than an arrowhead. It was about an inch long, and, interestingly, had had a “field repair.” The original delicate serration had broken along one edge, spoiling its symmetry, and someone–the original owner? a later finder?– had resharpened the broken side with plain bifacial knapping. Like a slightly tippy Christmas tree, it looks wonky but serviceable.
I’m not great at identifying flowers, either. But the desert was blooming.
New Mexico has been deep in drought, but about a week ago we had a day of rain. Unusual, because April is wind month; our rains arrive in the summer monsoon.
A few flowers are April bloomers regardless. Like this cactus with its incipient blooms, and twenty desert daisies.
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 