Tag Archives: Morrison formation

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Another Mystery

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We were picking our way down a remote and rocky draw in the Morrison when my companion looked back and said, “What’s that?”

We’re used to finding stone structures—stone is the building material out there—but we’d never seen anything like this. The unstable mudstone cliffs aren’t good for cliff dwellings, nor was this the regular, well-set look of an Ancestral Pueblo house or granary. Just stones, randomly stacked to fill a gap.

We scrambled up the tumbled cliff—always dicey, among the unstable fallen capstones—to see if we could understand what it was. Under the immense sandstone boulders, we found a room. 

The windward side had that gappy wall, though a sketchy barrier had been built on the open leeward side. Had the floor been built up with imported sand? Had those sawn posts, now fallen, held up a tarp of some sort? What looked like a bed of green juniper was a pack rat nest; the floor was thick with droppings. Among them were bits of rusty iron: a bolt, a rod, a strap from the leaf spring of a buggy or an early auto. What had once been in that metal frame? In the “forecourt” was a rusty bucket.

My guess would put the site in the thirties, latest. The ceiling was lightly smoked. Who lived here? Not in winter, certainly, nor during the monsoons. A sheepherder? So remote; were they in hiding? A moonshiner? An outlaw?

A lonely place, under looming stone. 

On Hiking in New Mexico, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Hard Land for a Living

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On a ridge above the crumbled, pink-and-black Morrison Formation was a decaying axe-cut juniper stump, signal to watch for the circular stone base of a hogan.

Sure enough:

It was probably nineteenth-century, because the juniper cribbing had decayed or been taken for firewood. Into it had been dumped the rusted remains of a McCormick wind pump dating to, say, the ranching thirties:

Outside the circle, laid carefully on a rock–“curated” by some previous visitor–was a 3″ chert hand axe. The Navajo had metal trade axes, so presumably this one was Archaic. Thousands of years older than both hogan and pump.

On Hiking in New Mexico, On Integrating Word and Image, On the Creative Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Surfaces

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Two weeks ago we walked on dust. But a few days of snow and rain have swollen the bentonite clay in the Morrison Formation into a soft, brickled carpet. Sun and wind will soon turn it to dust again, except where cryptobiotic organisms can anchor it.

In another stratum of the Morrison, the winter wet had brought down a layer of outwash like melted creamsicle: flat as a dance floor, delicate and thin as old wallpaper.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Marks

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I bit a dried ball of piñon pitch. It tasted like cloves.

The wide horseshoes of mesa canyons, naked slopes of the Morrison formation, eroded, sleeked by rain and full of the sandy tongues left by its torrents: a water-made landscape without a drop of water in it.

The Morrison slopes were fissured, pristine—sandy corries where only animals had walked. Footprints of coyote, mice, ravens, deer.

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