Tag Archives: Navajo hogan

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

There’s a Story Here

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Below the stone ring of a nineteenth-century Navajo hogan: a piece of sun-purpled glass—pre-1914, when a process was discovered that prevented clear glass from purpling in sunlight—between two snake vertebrae.

Perhaps you’d like to write that one?

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.