Big Crane Panel

In the spring of 2022, I explored the area along Comb Ridge, an amazing monocline, or fold in the Earth’s crust that runs for 90 miles in southeast Utah into Arizona. Much is in Bears Ears National Monument and is filled with ancient Puebloan homes, artifacts and rock art. A hike into Monarch Cave was a life experience that has become etched into me like the petroglyphs. Even on that trip, I had to return to Butler Wash road to explore another area called Wolfman’s Panel. If you look back at those images, you’ll see a couple large petroglyphs of Sandhill Cranes. When I finished that hike meeting no one on the trail, another car, the only one in the dirt lot, pulled up. The driver had just visited another nearby site called the Big Crane, and he gave directions how to get there. I didn’t have time that day, but tucked away the idea.

Butler Wash, Bears Ears National Monument

When I was planning this trip to view the annular eclipse, the remote Butler Wash Road seemed an ideal out-of-way place to go. And it would give me the opportunity to find the Big Crane. If you look carefully in the image above, you can see a row of cottonwoods half way up. That’s Butler Wash which remains a source of water for much of the year. You can also see a small dirt road heading into the wash. We followed that down to the wash and tucked the car behind the cottonwoods for a peaceful spot for dinner and sleeping. Chance and I then took an evening hike up Comb Ridge.

Slick Rock on Navajo Sandstone

After crossing the wash, you start the incline up the exposed sandstone. There are no trails here, so it’s best to download a map to follow on GPS. I got a new mapping app for this this trip called Gaia that is a terrific resource. Can you find Chance exploring on the slickrock? We got started too late to get up on the ridge to find the old houses that were there, so it was time to get back to camp to sleep, and head to the Big Crane in the morning.

Comb Ridge

Driving down Butler Wash road in the morning to get to the Big Crane trailhead, it was clear that many other folks had the same idea that Comb Ridge would be a good place to view the eclipse the next day. But today, we’d see if we could find the crane, and scope out places to potentially get images for the eclipse the next day. In the image above, you can see how the ridge got named like the combs on a rooster’s head. Similar features extend the nearly entire length and inside many of the draws were homes of the ancestral Puebloans.

Big Crane Petroglyph

You may be able to get a sense from this why many can’t find the crane when they hike here. As I noted, there are no trails, and certainly no signs saying, “look up here.” The life-size crane image is up the cliff side, so you could easily walk by it. It certainly looks the same style as the cranes on the Wolfman panel. Did the same person make them?

Amazingly, as I write this, I hear cranes flying south. The western ones were leaving a bit earlier and I was able to see several hundred at different times on this trip. Chance found a little shady alcove to rest in, while I sat under the crane and enjoyed the view. I could see other hikers coming up. Some to visit the crane, others moving further up the ridge for the view on the edge of the monocline.

Whoever created this image, perhaps 1,200 years ago, still starts conversations. I asked some people what they thought the circle was. One person said it was an egg. Another said it was the signature of the shaman who created the image.

I trust the idea Craig Childs offered in his book Tracing Time that I re-read during the trip. He shared something he was told about spirals and concentric circles by Aaron O’Brien at other sites. O’Brien showed him a sunrise picture he took on the equinox. The sun rose directly behind a rock tower miles away “like a needle piercing the yolk of a boiling egg.” Directly behind O’Brien “was the pictograph of a hematite bull’s-eye . . . a geometric stamp, perfect, singular symmetry. Stand here, it said. This concentric-circle pictograph was on a ledge along a red-faced cliff, canyon bottom dropping away below. Someone a thousand years ago climbed with pecking tools and left one circle within another. The rock tower it denominates is miles off, too far away to cast a shadow on the wall. The way to see the alignment is to turn away from the petroglyph and watch. It says: This is one of those places.”

Craig Childs, Tracing Time, p 45.

I put my back to the wall with the bulls-eye directly above on the red-faced cliff. The canyon bottom dropped away below. Straight south, not a degree off, perhaps a mile away, two melon-shaped hills joined together. And I wondered, on the summer solstice, does the sun cross over between those hills? Does the Milky Way pour into the valley at that point? This is one of those places.

We stayed a bit longer, then returned to the car, drove down the wash to find another canyon cut into Comb Ridge to search for Procession Panel

Procession Panel “trail”

Scanning the cliffs while hiking up the ridge, a few petroglyphs are carved into an alcove here and there. Then you are face-to-face with the Procession.

Procession Panel Petroglyphs

Just ahead of these elk is a circle, and three lines of human-like figures are all marching to the circle from different directions. They are joined with many animals, snakes, dinosaur-like creatures, and horse-headed humans. Someone counted 179 people in the three processions. Was it a great gathering, a hunt, a migration? And what is the figure standing on top of five fingered animals?

We cannot know today what was in the mind of the Basketmaker Era people who carved this into the rock. But we can stand with them a few moments and wonder. And then leave to find more.

Scotts Bluff National Memorial, Nebraska

I posted last Friday of the unexpected scenery in Colorado. On my return trip home, I visited a site pictured in history books since elementary school. While still remarkable to see, an encounter made that history come alive in an unexpected way and transported me to 1843.

For travelers coming across hundreds of miles of the Great Plains, the sandstone bluffs rising more than 800 feet above the grasslands was a remarkable sight, and a taste of the challenges to soon come. From atop the bluff, you can see Chimney Rock in the distant southeast, which for many travelers was the first hint of the changing landscape.

Looking the other direction today, the straight tracks of the Union Pacific head west. The city of Scottsbluff, Nebraska sits below.

You can drive up to the bluff or take a pet friendly trail through the grasslands and along the sandstone. After long drives in the car, the trail is welcome by humans and dogs.

Before the hike up the bluff, I’d stopped at the Vistor Center and chatted with the a volunteer ranger. He said, “You should’ve been here ten minutes ago. Decendents of some of the first migrants were just here. A lady named Alice is 97 years old.” Apparently, they left to drive up the bluff.

As you climb up the bluff, a tunnel cuts through the sandstone to get you to the other side. As I stopped to get a picture of Chance framed in the tunnel, an unexpected wildlife encounter ensued. Putting his retractable leash between my legs to be able to hold the camera, I was focusing when suddenly three pigeons flew into the tunnel. Chance jumped and turned to get them. They scattered in all directions—two back out and one over my head. The leash pulled out from between my legs as Chance ran toward the tunnel opening with a cliff on the other side, and the retractable handle whacked him, stunning him and causing him to sit before hitting the cliff. And I somehow got an image.

Returning to the Vistor Center, a display of covered wagons and oxen help you image the teams that crossed through the pass by Scotts Bluff. The first large contingent on the Oregon Trail, came through in 1843. About 1,000 people left Independence, Missouri that spring. Their elected captain was Peter Burnett, who in seven years would win another election to become the first governor of California.

Then I see a couple women in the parking lot, so I ask the older one, “Are you Alice?”

We had a nice chat. Alice Adams and her daughter were visiting Scotts Bluff for the first time. They still live in Oregon. Two sets of Alice’s great-grandparents were on the 1843 wagon train!

Alice Adams

A pleasant diversion to see an historical place and take a hike turned into an unforgettable encounter.

Standing Tall on Lewis & Harris

Hunters and foragers travelled by sea and populated the islands off Scotland for millennia. In the 4th Millennium BCE, seas were rising, and people of the Western Isles were farming. Sometime between the 29th and 26th centuries BCE, before the great pyramid was built in Egypt, before Stonehenge, they constructed a stone circle over the seaport on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis with nothing but the Atlantic beyond.

Calanais Standing Stones, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

The tall, center stone rises 16 feet above the low hill with lower stones spreading out in a large circle and then avenues of stones beyond. A burial chamber rests below the center stone. Wooden structures likely covered some of the area between the stones. Smaller stone circle were built throughout the area. The purposes of the stones faded, and after centuries of abandonment, they began to disappear under the thick peat that grows over much of Lewis. The sea level dropped over the millennia, the port disappeared, the sea loch slipped away and the open ocean hid somewhere beyond. The Gaelic name of Calanais also faded from much memory replaced by the Anglicized “Callanish.” The reason for the complex disappeared under the peat.

Callanish Standing Stones over East Loch Roag

In the 1980s, the site was closed for restoration due to visitors wearing down the dirt, and a detailed archeological study began. The soil, pollen, seeds, clay, and artifacts began to reveal some of the stories of people who lived here. The full, detailed report can be read at the Historic Environment Scotland website. Did the site serve a religious, political, or some other group purpose? Did the tallest stone serve as a signal to ocean sailors — the primary method of transportation of that time? Could the stones have served for astronomical observation? Like the distant ocean, the answers are beyond clear sight.

The stones seem to have come from a relatively close location. Among the few things known with certainty, the stones are Lewisian Gneiss, and at 3 million years old, among the oldest rocks on the planet. Beautiful, and almost looking alive while holding within the stories of the people who placed them here.

Lewisian Gneiss

The island is a single body, but the rolling, boggy north part of Lewis, transforms into the rugged, mountainous southern portion named Harris. I’d seen pictures of a single standing stone on Harris that leaned at a notable angle. While shooting the west coast at sunrise, a white reflection on a distant hill caught my eye. A fulmar flying over may help you spot it.

Bagh Steinigidh, Isle of Harris

That evening, we went to another shoot on a beach on the other side of that hill. Three of us decided to climb over the hill and search for the Macleod Stone. We found an opening in the farmer’s fence, and hiked down through the rocks on the top of the hill to spend some time with the standing stone.

Clach Mhic Leoid, or the Macleod Stone, Isle of Harris

Though this stone was erected nearly 5,000 years ago as well, no archeological dig has disturbed the site. Might there be evidence of other structures or burial sites? Did people farm and live here or was this set aside for ceremony. The mysteries remain.

As we approached the stone from the hill above, a couple were walking up from the beach with three collies in tow. Missing Chance, I got my fix of visiting and petting these pups while they enjoyed the ancient stone. Herding dogs would have been helpful to control the sheep and cattle who guarded the site when I visited standing stones on the Isle of Mull a few years ago. The animals, people, civilizations, and even the seas rise and fall while the stones stand watch.

Collies and Macleod Standing Stone, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

Hills are Alive

As Native American Heritage Month wraps up, I’d like to share some images of remnants of Mississippian Moundbuilders culture in southern Illinois and northern Kentucky. Just east of St. Louis is one of the few UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the U.S. that is not a national park—Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Cahokia Mounds was the largest Pre-Columbian urban settlement in what is now the United States. Most remaining Mississippian culture site across the eastern and southern U.S. have been plowed and built over, but a few remain. Here are some.

Just north of the Ohio River half of this mound village site is protected by the state of Illinois. This location was a Mississippian village for about 350 years beginning in 1050 C.E. That’s a period nearly equal to the time of the Jamestown settlement to the present.

Kincaid Mounds observation deck

The site is closed except for this observation platform where you can try to imagine the community that farmed and lived here for so long. And Chance believes many dogs used to live here, too. I didn’t even know about this site until I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way just before crossing the bridge into Kentucky. I’d picked up a brochure advertising Wickliffe Mounds State Park, and was going to explore that site when this surprise came up.

Wickliffe Mounds State Park, Kentucky

This small village began about 1100 C.E. on a bluff above the Mississippi River just after it was joined by the Ohio. This image is taken atop the large ceremonial mound. The mound behind the shelter was where the chief’s home was. Where the museum is on the right edge and the parking lot next to it was the village plaza. On the other side of the museum is a building covering the archeological dig where wattle and daub homes had been built and rebuilt over centuries.

Amateur archeologists began excavating the site in the early 20th century. After decades of private ownership, the land was given to Murray State College which then did further excavation until the area was eventually given to the state of Kentucky. For many years the skeletons of babies who were buried on the edges of the homes were displayed on the floor. As ethics and the law changed, the bones were buried in the burial mound that was behind the chief’s mound. I remember visiting Dickson Mounds on the Illinois River as a boy where a couple hundred human remains were displayed, but are now covered. The Dickson Mounds State Historical Museum was recently closed as well to repatriate some of the remaining artifacts.

Last night, the personal effect of this storage of human artifacts hit home. I attended a presentation by Frank Waln, a Dakota musician and storyteller. He helped curate an exhibit containing his music at the newly renovated Native American exhibition space at Chicago’s Field Museum. This fall he was performing at Harvard University, and was asked afterward to visit the university’s Peabody Museum where the curator wanted to talk with him. A newly-hired Native curator had discovered the museum held a collection of hair samples taken from residents of Indian boarding schools in the 1930s. One of the samples was from Frank’s great-grandmother. He was given an opportunity to pray there. Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that the University will be returning the hair to the families it can identify.

If you’d like to listen to Frank’s (or Oyate Teca Obmani in his native language) presentation, you can watch here.

Mississippi River

The Wickliffe Mounds volunteer told me there was a nearby overlook of the Mississippi River where Fort Jefferson had been built by George Rogers Clark during the American Revolution. The ruins of the fort was later visited by his brother Merriweather on his expedition west. It is hard to see in this resolution of the image, but in the distance is the bridge to Cairo, the southernmost point of Illinois, which had once been a major city but is now mostly in ruin as the fort had been.

As I enjoyed the view, this 80 year old fellow pulled up in his 1955 Chevy. He said he’d lived there his whole life and he’s never seen the Mississippi so low. I told him my dad had a ‘57 Chevy that same color, and he built a board across the leg space of the back seat, so that I could have free range over the back as we travelled around the country in that car.

Millstone Bluff, Shawnee National Forest, Illinois

Back in Illinois, I asked a ranger at Shawnee National Forest for ideas of new places I could visit. She told me about the Mississippian culture site at Millstone Bluff, so off Chance and I went. There are some petroglyphs carved into these stones, but they are very difficult to identify. If you’d like to see petrogylphs in Illinois, a much better location is Piney Creek that I wrote about earlier.

Pictograph?, Millstone Bluff

I couldn’t get any good images of the few petroglyphs I could identify. However, some leaves and the sun helped me find the bird images that might have been there once.

Gravesite, Millstone Bluff

The village here was on top of a bluff and surrounded by a stone wall. The trail circles the village site, and the first location you come upon was the grave area. Long ago, scavengers dug and looted all the graves looking for artifacts.

As you walk around the village, large depressions remain where homes had been. The homes were half underground with wattle and daub structures above. They would be occupied for many years and then burnt down either to get rid of physical or spiritual pests. Later a home would again be rebuilt there.

For me, the most moving part of the visit was seeing the village plaza. The place had been occupied for hundreds of years, and the plaza was trod by generations of Mississippians. The earth was so compacted that even today trees cannot grow where the plaza had been.

Millstone Bluff village plaza

Walking among Monarchs

Comb Ridge, as I’ve referenced the past two Tuesdays, is a monocline running north to south in eastern Utah. Butler Wash drains the east side with a dusty road roughly paralleling the wash. Plenty of unmarked side tracks lead off the road, and we followed one to camp next to the wash. In the morning, Scorpio lay near the horizon, but soon faded away as Venus, Jupiter and the Moon lead the sun to greet the day.

We looked south to where we’d be exploring for the rest of the day.

By late afternoon, we’d done several hikes. Two were in unmarked areas that looked interesting, and one was up Cold Spring Cave that I mentioned two weeks ago. None of these areas are signed, but many are well known and easy to get the coordinates for. Just south of Cold Spring Cave is Monarch Cave. My Google timeline map shows the small canyons cut into the ridge that were home to the Ancestral Puebloans and those before them.

We’d only met a few people at Cold Spring and no one else earlier in the day, so it was surprising to see several cars parked at the pull out for Monarch Cave, including a big, white pickup with government plates. The hike starts by going down into Butler Wash before climbing up the other side. A group slowly walked toward us, so Chance and I got off the trail in the shade of the wash to wait, and we chatted with the first hiker. She was the director of Native affairs for Bears Ears National Monument. She and several BLM staff led a pilgrimage for Paiute elders on a pilgrimage to the ancestral homes. We exchanged greetings as they worked their ways on the path. An auspicious start for our journey into this monument created at the urging of five local tribes.

While the hike is not strenuous, it is by no means easy navigating the roots, rocks and boulders especially with the canes and walking sticks the elders were using. I’d downloaded some off line maps for this and other hikes I was thinking of taking on the trip. Some of the areas don’t have defined trails, and it’s not hard to lose your way on some of the routes, especially when going across slickrock, and it’s rare to have cell service in the area. The downloaded trail maps work well with GPS and are a great help in finding the way to your trail or destination, or more importantly, back to your car. It’s also helpful to have a dog who often has better scents finding the right route than I do with my eyes.

This time Chance and I both got off the route. While hiking up a relatively narrow canyon you won’t get lost, you’ll just not get the easiest route. Looking at our GPS dot on the All Trails app, we could hike back down to find the trail or just go up and along the cliff near us to follow it toward the head of the canyon. We headed up to the cliff and walked along it. Eventually, ahead of us was a cluster of trees with one tall one growing very close to the cliff wall blocking our way. I needed to take my water pack off and squeeze sideways between the tree and cliff to continue on.

And there, nose-to-nose was a three foot anthropomorph staring at me!

This picture was a challenge to take. With the tree right behind me, I had to step back and open to my widest lens to fit the fellow in, and then I started seeing the other figures. With Chance resting in the shade, I retraced our way back along the cliff. Going back forty or fifty feet, the wall was filled with petroglyphs that I had been blind to walking right along side until this fellow jumped me.

Above this guy was a long line over thirty feet continuing on past the tree and back to where I’d been. Craig Childs writes: “What I and most other rock art followers and archaeologists call a centipede—a straight line of any length with many smaller lines and dashes coming off of it, sometimes with two antenna-like segments at one end— [Rory] Tyler believes represents brush fences for hunting and channeling game, as bristled, frightening, and impassable as giant centipedes. When he looks at the country around him, Tyler sees hunting landscapes. Rock art shows how it was done and what magic was needed to make it happen.”

Craig Childs, Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau (2022), p 110.

A little further back and just below the centipede were these spirals. Childs devotes a chapter in his book to Spirals and Concentric Circles. He shares the interpretations of his Zuni friend Chris Lewis.

Lewis sees spirals as information. To him, they tell which way people came from and which way they were going. Some unravel into a tail that can be traced across a rockface to where the line comes out of a small divot pecked into the rock. That divot is an emergence place or a destination, the line and the spiral being the journey taken once you’ve stepped foot in the world. He said that linked spirals, which look like disks of converging or departing galaxies, show communities either splitting or coming together. He told me what they portray depends on where the spirals are placed, clockwise facing north, or counter-clockwise facing south. Variables of possible placements and directions are as numerous as stories of migration among Pueblo people. Movement is written into the foundation of these people. Over their history, their journeys might look like a turning, changing circle, a constant search for a center-place, every bend honing inward.

Childs, Tracing Time, p 44. Yes, these south facing spirals turn counter-clockwise.

For [Lewis], these [experiences] were choices along the curve of a spiral that is a person’s life. He said, “You may be one of those things, but at some point, through life and experiences, you spiral into your truth and find your center.

Childs, Tracing Time, p 43

.After exploring this panel, it was time to squeeze past the tree again, say good-bye to the fellow who stopped me, and continue the hike. It was not too far to find the old structures.

Monarch Cave, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah

This was part of the 85% of Bears Ears National Monument that Donald Trump removed from protection as a national monument to open it up to drilling and extraction rights. This was the first time a president used the Antiquities Act to remove land from federal protection. Trump is man who has no truth and no center. One of President Biden’s first acts was to fully restore the monument.

Like the one above, an image I posted from nearby Cold Spring Cave had similar polished holes which I described as used for grinding corn. The narrow shape didn’t make sense to me, but my imagination for other uses was limited. Childs explained them:

Carol Patterson, a Four Corners scholar and ethnohistorian, has visited these grinders and tells me they are paint pots. Grinding corn, she notes, requires a rectangular trough, deeper, wider and sometimes with peck marks in the bottom for breaking up the corn kernels. . . The grinding holes in the cave have smooth, almost glassed bottoms, and are relatively small, not meant for the industrious work of crushing corn. Seeing handprints all around, and recognizing pigment dishes, Patterson believes these were made for pulverizing minerals to be mixed with water and a fixative. This would have been where paint was made for going up on the walls. The blue-greens are all the same blue-greens, yellows all the same yellows, reds all the same reds. Preparing pigment is a science.

Ute elder Clifford Duncan . . . explained to her that the depressions on a large flat slab of fallen rock in front of them had been an important gathering place for these paint parties.

Childs, Tracing Time, p 21-22.

The panel I first stumbled upon was nearly all petroglyphs pecked into the cliff. However, here by the buildings, there’d been lots of painting parties. The galleries were filled with pictographs, and most of those seemed to be handprints. Childs has a chapter devoted to them:

The late anthropologist Florence Hawley Ellis wrote in 1968, “Tracing one’s hand on the wall of a scared place brings a blessing into one’s self, like ‘taking the breath’ from any sacred object.” Ellis . . . described the completion of a ceremony where a leader paints his hand white and presses it against the kiva or cave wall to signify that he has carried out his religious duty. . . . Ellis’s knowledge was earned from time spent with Indigenous people descended from these pictograph makers. She saw handprints as drawing supernatural forces to a point, so that spirits that have been called will know where to direct their blessing.

. . .

Stenciled hands outlined in paint . . . tend to come later during the Pueblo era, the time of multi-story room blocks and masonry villages. For a stencil, pigment was sprayed around the hand leaving a negative impression on the rock.

. . .

The first question that may come up is, what does it mean? After sitting with a site for longer, you’ll wonder instead, what does it express? Questions eventually turn to who made it, who was meant to see it, and where do you stand between these two?

Childs, Tracing Time, pp 15-17.

In respect to people who lived here, to the elders who had just visited, and to those yet to come, Chance stayed tied in a shady spot below the cave. He talked to me once in a while, but we, and those from the past were the only ones here. While most of the images were handprints, some larger figures floated by. I assume this is a woman with her hair in buns aside her head.

These upright drifting figures, however, are beyond death, possibly immortal. “Hands are neutralized, feet are not walking,” [Carol Peterson] said. “These guys have transformed into spirit.” The term she gave them was cloud beings.

. . .

Micah Loma’omvaya, an archaeologist and anthropologist, member of the Bear Clan at Hopi, has a similar angle. [He] told me that these were holy people, those in contact with the supernatural. “Whenever you see hands this way,” he said, holding his hands downward, “it is knowledge, the knowledge of how to create life.”

. . .

I side with Loma’omvaya, where understanding does not come from books as much as it does from walking and talking in fields of rock art. It comes from being there, receiving a place with your senses and from the perspectives of others. Being here is the cleanest way for me to come to understanding. Looking at these floating figures, you don’t have to be told by scientists and scholars that they are beyond human. You feel it.

Chris Lewis, a farmer, weaver, and keeper of stories from Zuni Pueblo, called these figures spirit beings, and said the Zuni word for spirit translates into English as the word raw. “They are raw beings,” he told me. “When you’re born, you’re raw, and when you’re dying, you’re raw. That’s when you sense and know the spirit world. After we’re born, when we’re our age, we’re not raw anymore. We’re cooked.”

Childs, Tracing Time, pp 28-30.

As you move along the wall, more signs appear then were there when you first walked by. Some low, some eye level, some above you. In places there are holes in the rock where beams once supported a roof. The art above perhaps could only be seen if you were on the roof.

Then you find a wall flooded with images, the definition of a palimpsest, figures overwritten, older ones showing through from below. Images seems to be swimming among one another, a swirling school, a murmuration.

I am mistaken thinking these were meant for me to see. A flock of birds doesn’t spot me and think, Oh good, he’s looking. They serve their own purpose. Mine is to look up and notice.

Standing inside a shelter covered with hundreds of red-painted figures is bewildering. I don’t know where my eye should land. . . . If you walk up to a panel and have no idea where to start, even after staring for a minute or two, it’s probably not a panel, but a gallery.

. . .

When I looked to the ground, I saw dishes polished in the bedrock. These had been used to hold pigment, brushes dipped and brought to the wall. The chamber hummed with life force, memory, power, whatever you want to call it. . . . Whatever I imagined of these figures, they came down to the simple fact of people leaving many memories in one place. It is what Carol Patterson calls, “the presence of meaning.” You don’t have to know what it is, only that it exists.

Childs, Tracing Time, pp 135, 141-142.

The visit that started with the elders, that continued with the three-foot man staring at me, stopping me in my tracks and telling me to look, was coming to an end. I heard voices coming up the canyon. We were no longer alone with these memories on the walls. I laid on the ground to get a last picture of the gallery above my head. As if they were going up for the first time, I saw red hands, then white, black, green and the silhouette of one over all the others. And then I couldn’t see any. There in the desert, my eyes were filled with water.

Try not to let you mind play tricks on you. Try not to think of anything at all. Listen to your breath and make the walk a contemplation, moonless and suspended. There’s no doubt in my mind the land is haunted. It’s not a childhood fantasy. So many memories cannot be in one place without continuing to ring.

. . .

Ways of responding to these galleries are countless. You come to them with dread, elation, curiosity. Imagine painters running brushes all over, one after the next, a time-lapse of generations. You see an artist in silence working alone, like Michelangelo lying on his back, pigment flecking off a ceiling into his eyes.

This is how easily some art can be destroyed. Paint hangs on by a crust and it feels like a single breath could make it come down. A simple act, a brush of the hand, could cause time to end.

Childs, Tracing Time, pp 138, 140.

Rocking Art with Wolfman

A couple of the images in last week’s post were of Cold Spring Cave on Comb Ridge. That hike was followed by what was the most profound hike of the trip into Monarch Cave. I’ll write about that later. I thought of doing another hike that day to a site called Wolfman Panel, but it was getting late and we were tired from hiking and decided to head west to our next location and look for a camping spot. When we returned east a day later, I wanted to drive back up Comb Ridge and try for Wolfman Panel again. We hiked through Butler Wash and got to slickrock with Comb Ridge in the background, and thought it’d make a good picture with Chance.

Comb Ridge, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah

We were approaching the canyon that we’d be walking along and where we should find the Wolfman Panel on our east side of the canyon. However, as I’m looking at Chance and down into the canyon I see that some structures were built over there and that we might need to lengthen our hike and explore the west side of the canyon. But first, we worked our way down into our east side of the canyon and soon met the Wolfman.

Before this trip, I’d read House of Rain by Craig Childs. His very engaging writing is essentially a collection of essays of his travels and experiences around the Four Corners area and beyond. In that book he explores the peripatetic history of the Ancestral Puebloans, and one chapter was based on a hike on Comb Ridge that inspired me to visit this area. He just published a new book, Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau. I’m about half way through, and once again thoroughly engrossed by his writing.

“When I take a picture of a rock art panel, I’m both frustrated that I can’t include everything and glad I can’t, because where would it end?

“I have the same challenge with the journal in my hand as I enter words about the hummingbird and the bodies around it, trying to take in the waning afternoon and the broad shotgun of this valley. Writing may be able to encompass a larger spectrum than photography, but it is still a frame. Most of the pieces are left out. I see only the basic picture, something ancient on a wall, perhaps sleepers, dreamers, portrayals of the dead from a people I scarcely know. This is the nature of a colonist, a person in unfamiliar land. No matter how many marriages and births occurred in my family line, I’ve barely arrived. I am stepping foot on my own home ground in a land that is not mine. I plant the flag of my body at a row of ghostmen where later, after sunset, I’ll take my flag back down and go home.”

Craig Childs, Tracing Time pp 34-35.

The two foot high Wolfman was a low key greeter to the spectacular petroglyphs that were soon high on the wall pecked into the darker desert patina. Unbelievably, (or perhaps not) some idiot had desecrated the images with rifle blasts into the wall. Continuing along the canyon wall, there was a glimpse of the old buildings ahead and the most spectacular parts of this panel.

Bears Ears National Monument contains over 100,000 cultural sites. This panel is likely from the later Basketmaker period before 750 CE. One of the experts Childs interviews is Laurie Webster, and she mentions the fellow in this panel when talking about woven waist sashes found in some burials nearby.

“Webster sees the same sash on the tall petroglyph of a man near the San Juan River in Utah, a site called the Wolfman Panel. A male is rendered in sharp detail down to the curve of calf and thigh muscles, his hands and feet enlarged and hanging down as if floating, which may depict someone who has died, or who has spiritual powers. He wears a head ornament, a hair comb with what is believed to be a feathered top. A remnant of dark zigzag paint shows at his waist, what Webster takes to be the same kind of woven sash she saw on the young man buried in the cave.

“‘I’m wondering if that’s all men wore, if they wore braided sashes around their waist and let it all hang out,’ she said.”

Craig Childs, Tracing Time p 82.

What captures my attention are the two sandhill cranes next to the man. These images may have been made over 1,300 years ago, but a million years before even the Basketmaker people were here, the cranes were migrating through. Why did people add these birds to this panel? Five months earlier in November, I saw thousands of Sandhills a few hundred miles south of here along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. They spend the winter there and further south and would fly through this area in November on the way south and again in March heading north from the Rio Grande to the San Juan to the Platte River and some on to Canada and Alaska. They would only be here briefly passing through. This wall faces west. Does the light hit here around the spring equinox when they are flying north? At my home on the eastern flyway, I paint them in my head on St. Patrick’s Day when I hear and see them going north. Why did these people put these brief visitors here next to these other figures?

The mystery of those buildings on the other side of the canyon was too great, so Chance and I worked our way down to the wash and through the reeds growing there. Chance drank some water, reminding us why they built their homes here, and we headed up the canyon wall on the west side. Though you are not suppose to take or even move and relics you find, people place potsherds they find on rocks or walls like the collection seen here. Many are plain, some are inscribed or patterned in shapes and colors.

There were more petroglyphs and many pictographs on this side of the canyon, too. There were several very graphic stars incised into the walls. Then there was this petroglyph of a much more recent origin. Is this some recent graffiti or is it from some 19th century visitors? And note—they wear sashes.

I’m a recent visitor to this canyon that has had many people living and visiting here for thousands of years. And all of us are recent visitors to the generations of animals and birds who have traveled through and around Comb Ridge.

“How long till my lines become indigenous is hardly worth talking about, not something that ever happens. I’m thinking many thousands of years, but that might be a stretch. Coming to this panel might be a way of asking permission, standing with a shield figure at sunrise, bearing the same cold, the same expectation for sunrise.”

Craig Childs, Tracing Time, p 65.

Ancestral Puebloan buildings

A major focus of my trip to the Four Corners area was to explore the homeland of the Ancestral Puebloans. While it was a trip back a millennium, it also offered reflections on a century of change on how to appreciate these sites and respect the wishes and beliefs of the decedents of those peoples. A tiny, obscure national monument created in 1919 is in some ways a full circle of this last century.

Yucca House National Monument

Laying in the shadow of Sleeping Ute Mountain to the west and Mesa Verde to the east bubbles a spring named Aztec Springs in the erroneous belief that the structures laying in ruin around it were built by the Aztec people of Mexico, following the common 19th century understanding that no peoples of this region had the capacity to build such structures. An estimated 600 buildings including 100 kivas and one great kiva surrounded the spring. The rancher who owned this land donated the roughly ten acres of the pueblo to the federal government. President Wilson declared it Yucca House National Monument to avoid naming confusion with nearby Aztec Ruins National Monument.

A visit today is little different then one might have been in 1919. You drive through a large ranch stopping for some of the hundreds cows and calves crossing the open range road, park near a small gate to keep the cattle out and enter the scene above. In 1964 a crew exposed and stabilized the wall shown above. While it had been the rancher’s hope in 1919 that the federal government would excavate and rebuild the site as was being done at Mesa Verde National Park, it remains as it looked a century ago.

Sand Canyon Pueblo, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument

North of Sleeping Ute Mountain are thousands of Ancestral Puebloan sites in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument. Sand Canyon Pueblo was about the size of Yucca House, but as was typical of 12th century communities, it was built around the edges of the head of a canyon. It had a wall surrounding the pueblo and fourteen tower throughout. Between 1983 and 1993, Crow Canyon Archeological Center in nearby Cortez, Colorado did a bit of excavation at the site and then reburied their work. (You can view many lectures and presentations by the Center by searching Crow Canyon on YouTube.) This practice respects the wishes of contemporary Natives who do not want their ancestors’ home disturbed. The site is well signed which helps visualize what the incredible village looked like 900 years ago while allowing one to feel the presence of people who lived here.

Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Culture National Historical Park

Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico may have been the religious, political, economic and cultural center of the Ancestral Puebloans, and Pueblo Bonito the heart. From this vantage on the mesa above, you can imagine the four story buildings at the back of the D-shaped great house. The wall in the center separating the plazas runs north-south and the wall on the south side aligns with the rising and setting sun on the Equinoxes. How much of this great house was lived in or was a ceremonial center remains a mystery. Similar though smaller great houses line both sides of Chaco Canyon, and more pueblos were built on the mesas above.

About a half mile behind the overlook of Pueblo Bonito are the mostly unexcavated remains of Pueblo Alto. At the peak of the late Puebloan period from about 850 to 1300 CE, more people lived in the Four Corners area then there are today. Now we ship in food, supplies and water. Then they lived off what the land provided in conditions much like today.

Chaco Culture National Historic Park is remote and a challenge to drive to. Most of the visitors who come stay in the canyon, so a hike up to the sites on the mesas won’t have many others nearby. A silent walk into the center of a kiva may show a collection of potsherds and tools left behind.

Comb Ridge is a steep, narrow monocline ridge running north south for about 80 miles in eastern Utah to Arizona. A rough road runs on the east side mostly along Butler Wash which parallels the rooster-comb shaped ridge. The ridge and canyons cut into it were home to many of the ancestors. For over a century, these people were referred to as Anasazi. However, that was a term used by the Navajo, who came to the Four Corners area from the northwest. The term meant “ancient enemies,” so the current Pueblo tribes of Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and Laguna prefer the term Ancestral Puebloan.

Cold Spring Cave, Comb Ridge, Bears Ears National Monument

We met no one else on the hike down and up Butler Wash and across the slick rock to Cold Spring Cave. There, three visitors were having lunch and drawing the old structures in their sketchbooks. The Native people prefer these places not be called “ruins,” believing the sites are still inhabited by the spirits of ancestors. It doesn’t take much to consider them there looking behind an ancient wall to far, dark corner of the cave where moss hangs down and a quiet drip of water falls.

Their presence remains in the metates dug into the stone. Were different ones for different foods or different families? Did several people kneel along side each other talking and grinding meal? Remarkably, maize cobs remain behind. Petroglyphs speak from the walls, and some as this on the lower right, on the daily work surface. The walls also have pictographs of hands and other shapes, but those will wait for a future post.

From under the protective overhang the ancestors could be dry from the occasional rain, or cool from the nearly always present sun, or wonder as the stars rose over the eastern horizon. And maybe some were called from this location to head east and visit Chaco Canyon. Along the way, they may have stopped at what today is called Aztec Ruins, almost exactly due north of Chaco.

Great Kiva, Aztec Ruins National Monument

Recreating ancient scenes in your mind is a creative challenge. The scene pictured above wouldn’t be recreated today, but in 1934 archeologist Earl Morris reconstructed and rebuilt the Great Kiva at Aztec Ruins National Monument. The four pillars supported the massive roof. Next to the pillar on the right are the four stones originally found under the pillar to engineer support. The rectangular basins remain a mystery, but they may have been covered with wood planks and drummed or danced on to create a rhythm inside the kiva. It is believed people stood or sat on the floor, and the benches along the wall were reserved for ancestors. Likewise, it is believed most people entered the kiva through the hole in the ceiling, though perhaps some dancers entered through the doorways high on the walls or sat dressed as spirits to watch the proceedings inside.

The kivas were built honoring the six cardinal directions—east, west, north, south, up and down. They were built with the simplest stone age tools. They had no wheels to help transport the tons of massive timbers needed to enclose the roof that came from sixty to a hundred miles away. No pulleys were used to raise the timbers. The symmetrical walls were precisely built to align with celestial events. Still on the summer solstice, people gather in the kiva to watch the rectangular light from the east facing door to move up and along the wall to exactly fill in the bottom rectangle on the stairs below the west facing door.

The Antiquities Act was created in 1906 in large part to allow the president to establish national monuments by decree to protect these ancient sites that were being looted. Theodore Roosevelt used the Act first to protect natural features such as Devils Tower and Grand Canyon as well as ancient native sites. No president, until Donald Trump, used the Act to “unprotect” federal land. His massive reduction of Bears Ears and other national monuments, were reversed by President Biden.

Also in 1906, Congress passed another law to create the first National Park established to “preserve the works of man.” While the stars of Mesa Verde National Park are the Thirteenth Century cliff dwellings, the park has over 4,700 archeological sites from small farm dwellings dating from 550 CE to pit houses, pueblos and towers. The park presents an opportunity to experience the full story of the Ancestral Puebloans before they left the Four Corners to go south into Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico.

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park

1972 -- National Park Journey, Part 3: Montana centennial

While at Yellowstone in 1972, we drove south to Grand Teton National Park for a quick visit and a taste of how spectacular the Rockies could be. We then headed north in Montana to Glacier National Park. When crossing the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, I found what had been a single, spectacular ridge of mountains at Grand Teton were now peaks in all directions as far as you could see. A hike near Logan Pass was filled with blooming flowers, and mom spotted our first grizzly bear. Glacier would fill me with the most majestic landscape on this trip.

Mom & me, Glacier Nat’l Park —1972

Jane and I would visit Glacier in the fall of 1991 with Joe, then nearly two years old. Dan would be born nine months later.

Joe, MacDonal Creek, Glacier Nat’l Park — 1991

On that 1991 trip, we spent two nights in East Glacier and two in Apgar on the west side, and every day had a morning and afternoon hike. The first image below is of Logan Pass with snow still on the ground in July 1972, and the second is on the Highline Trail from near there with early fall colors in September 1991.

Logan Pass, Glacier NP — 1972

Highline Trail, Glacier Nat’l Park — 1991

Glacier’s the park highest on our list to return to, but the logistics of getting there are challenging. However, I’ve returned often to the Montana Rockies through the fiction and non-fiction of my favorite writer Ivan Doig. Travel so often opens the door to wanting to read more about a place, and the books and the visits echo back and forth. Doig’s Ride with Me, Mariah Montana is set in 1989, the centennial year of Montana’s statehood. The narrator greets dawn in the capitol city of Helena. And there I was in the book, and in my mind back to the view I had one sunrise. In 1989 I’d finished a hearing the day before, and we celebrated with a dinner at a restaurant in Last Chance Gulch. I got up before sunrise to hike up a nearby hill above the fire tower, and sat in the grass to watch the city wake. And Doig wrote for me:

“Dawn is when I have always liked life most, the forming hour or so before true day, and that next morning . . . I went out to sit on a picnic table and watch Helena show off its civic ornaments in the daybreak light. The dark copper dome of the state capitol. The Catholic Cathedral’s set of identical twin steeples. . . My favorite, though, stood perched on the high side of Last Chance Gulch, above the historic buildings downtown; the old fire watchtower up on four long legs of strutwork. Like a belltower carefully brought to where it could sound alarm into every street when needed. What a daystarting view it must be from there, out over the spread city and this broad shallow bowl of cultivated valley and the clasping ring of mountains all around.

               In what seemed just another minute, the sun was up. That’s the trouble with dawn, it doesn’t last.”

Helena, Montana — 1989

Next, my parents and I visited the National Bison Range a bit south of Glacier on the Flathead Reservation. Managed by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, the herd was from the last free ranging bison in the world. The magic for me for was seeing the pronghorn running across the plains among the bison. Dad asked me to get out of the truck to pick up a map and brochure from the nearby kiosk, and as I turned to go back, there was a bison that looked nearly as big as the camper. I snapped away on my Kodak Instamatic.

National Bison Range, Montana - 1972

I thought of that moment when nearly 40 years later, I was laying in the grass in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, alone and miles from anyone, taking pictures of prairie dogs, when a herd of bison surrounded me and decided to graze. I had to stay there, sitting in grass for a very long time, eventually talking in a low voice to the bull staring at me telling him how I’d be quietly walking away. But I got some great images first while thinking, “When am I ever going to get closer buffalo shots than this?”

What was the National Bison Range is now simply called the “Bison Range.” The land and the herd had been taken from the native peoples as part of the Allocation Act early in the 20th century. In 2020, Congress finally passed legislation to transfer management of the range back to the Indigenous peoples in the area. You can watch a fascinating short documentary created just on the verge of this transfer occurring.

Doig’s English Creek trilogy begins with Scottish immigrant brothers setting up their sheep ranch in the foothills of Rockies in the year of the state’s founding. The final volume is set a century later, and Mariah is one of the founding brother’s granddaughter. The cover of is an illustration of Mariah photographing at the Bison Range:

“My heart did some flutters as . . . I listened to her prowling around on that slick metal roof. I mean, oughtn’t here be some kind of hazard rule that a photographer never do anything a four-year-old kid would have the sense not to?

My flutters turned into genuine internal gyrations as the old bull shook off the last smatters of his dust refreshment, stood for a minute with his half-acre head down as if pondering deeply, then began plodding directly toward the motorhome. . .

‘Hey, up there. . . How about coming down in? This old boy looks kind of ornery.’

Answer from on high consisted of a sudden series of whing-whingswhings, like a little machine going. It took me a bit—about four more paces by the inexorable buffalo—to figure out the blurty whing sounds, which kept on and on, as being the noise of a motorized camera Mariah resorted to when she wanted to fire the shutter fast enough to capture every motion. As now. ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ her voice eventually came down but of course none of the rest of her. ‘When am I ever going to get closer buffalo shots than this?’

Ivan Doig, Ride with me, Mariah Montana, 1990

Theodore Roosevelt National Park - 2009

We continued west across Idaho into Washington, and I remember being surprised how hot it was. Florida might’ve had hot summers, but I’d never been in 100 degree weather before. The Chevy had no air conditioning, so my right arm was sunburned. Dad did all the driving, so his left arm was burnt, and mom sat in the middle except when I rode laying down in the back camper. I remember spitting Washington cherry pits out the window as we drove the dry plains. We toured the Grand Coulee Dam and the nearby Dry Falls of the Columbia before heading to the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. (To be continued.)

1972--National Park Journey, Part 2: Yellowstone Centennial

After stops at Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, and Devils Tower, time for Yellowstone National Park which was celebrating the centennial of its creation as the country's first national park. Nearing the park, I saw the Rocky Mountains for the first time. They were nothing like the Appalachians I was familiar with, and I first appreciated where the verse “purple mountains’ majesty” came from. The sights of new wonders were just beginning. We camped at Mammoth Hot Springs campground, hiked boardwalks around the springs, and attended the ranger programs at night.

Dad and me, Liberty Cap, Mammoth Hot Springs - 1972

We went to our first ranger campfire program at Badlands National Monument. I was hooked from that first one making sure to attend one in every park we camped in, and I continue to be amazed by the talents of interpretive rangers.

We’ve been cleaning the crawl space and having lived here 34 years, there’s lots of old stuff under there. One box had several items from this trip, including a book from Yellowstone that year.

Thirty-one summers later, my wife, three kids and I would stay at one of the small cabins at Mammoth and take a great hike on the Beaver Ponds Trail which crosses from Wyoming into Montana. Our oldest was 14, the same age I was on my first visit. The kids were as enchanted as I had been with bison, elk, mountain goats, bear and moose.

Joe & Jane, Beaver Ponds Trail - 2003

I don’t remember where else in Yellowstone my parents and I camped in ‘72, but we did take the park loop drives, and entered into the bizarre geyser basins. Of all the wonders of Yellowstone—animals, alpine lake, waterfalls, the canyon—the thermal features are what always transport me to a different world.

Mom and me, Upper Geyser Basin - 1972

Dan, Upper Geyser Basin - 2003

After that first trip, I longed to return to see these wonders. My first chance came in May 1989 when Jane was pregnant with our first. I had a hearing in Helena, Montana and extended it to visit Yellowstone. One of the park roads had just been plowed open with a good ten feet of snow towering on both sides. A notable sight from this trip was the number of animal carcasses around. Many food sources were destroyed in the devastating fires the prior fall, a hard winter followed, and many animals did not survive. The park was still beautiful and among the many signs of destruction, tiny pine seedlings sprouted in the burnt soil. Future visits would witness the steady regrowth of those forests.

Of course, Yellowstone was celebrating its centennial in 1972. One of my hobbies was coin collecting, so getting a silver centennial medallion was my big souvenir of the trip. And I got a centennial to patch to sew on my jacket alongside my Apollo mission patches! I suspect souvenirs for this year’s sesquicentennial celebration will have more inclusive language.

We also drove to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and saw the magnificent colors in the canyon walls, and even hints of steam from thermal features venting there. In 2003, just a few months after my dad died, we’d take a family photo at the canyon that would become that year’s Christmas card.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone - 2003

Then in February 2017 Jane and I, new empty nesters, would return with friends to see the canyon when it looked like a Christmas card blanketed in snow.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone - February 2017

On that trip we had stayed three nights at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge taking some brisk snowshoe hikes and warm snow coach excursions. We then stayed in Jackson Hole for a week and got to the Grand Canyon via a ferociously cold snowmobile ride from the south entrance. We all might still be thawing out from that ride! However, seeing an empty park with snow-covered bison plowing through drifts and steam from their mouths echoing nearby thermals is a sight never to be forgotten.

Not sure that I’ll get to Yellowstone to celebrate #150. If I do, I’d like to visit in the fall, the one season I’ve not experienced there. I’m so thankful to my parents for introducing me to Yellowstone and sharing the wonders of wildlife, scenery, weird thermals, and the park’s simple, quiet beauty. To return over decades with my own children and with friends adds more depth to the memories. Thank you to those who helped preserve this treasure 150 years ago, and to all those who continue to work there to sustain the wonders for us and future generations.

For Part Three, we’ll head north.

1972 -- A National Park Journey begins, Part 1

Fifty years ago, in early 1972, my dad bought a Chevy pickup with a hard-shell camper for a summer trip to the West with mom and me. Dad had retired as a Chicago police sergeant and took a job as a school bus driver in Florida, in part so he would have vacation when I was out of school. I hadn’t been farther west than St. Louis where we’d visited the new Gateway Arch (now National Park) a few years before. I’d picked up the travel bug from my parents, but this 10,000 mile adventure, including stops at a dozen national park sites, would ignite my love for national parks.

On spring break we took a shake down trip with my friend Doug up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Shenandoah National Park. In late June, just after turning 14, we took our annual trip to Chicago with a stop in Vincennes, Indiana for a reunion picnic with dad’s family. We might have visited the George Rogers Clark National Memorial, since we often did when visiting there. It’s possible this was the first national park unit site I’d ever visited.

George Roger Clark National Historical Park, Vincennes, Indiana

We then continued on to Chicago to visit family there. Dad stayed in the city to attend the Moose convention, while mom and I rode the Greyhound bus to northern Minnesota to visit her mother, brother and his family. After dad joined us, we headed west.

First stop—Badlands National Monument (it wouldn’t be designated a national park until 1978). We camped near the Ben Reifel visitors center and attended our first evening ranger talk. I was hooked and would make sure to find the schedule for these campfire talks for the rest of the trip. Badlands would become one of my most visited parks.

Badlands National Monument, South Dakota — me and mom

The Badlands would be a stop twice with Jane and our kids on road trips west. Our second visit there as a family was in 2003 when Joe was as old as I was on my first visit. He and Dan scampered up some of the formations.

Badlands National Park, 2003

My first time returning to camp in the park would be in 2009 as part of a solo trip to visit Theodore National Park in North Dakota. I set up the tent in the remote Sage Creek campground where I woke to a bison walking through the campground.

Badlands, Sage Creek Campground, 2009

In May 2020, tired of Covid quarantining, my photographer son Dan and I decided we could take a safe, isolated trip by packing the car with food, drink and camping and photography gear for three days in the Badlands.

Badlands, Dan on the Door trail, 2020

We had a great time, with exquisite photography conditions and had fun camping even though the intense winds blew our tent away one day while we were out shooting. I’m pretty sure we saw our campsite location in Frances McDormand’s Nomandland that year. We had lots of wildlife encounters and got to enjoy the night skies. Now, back to 1972.

Milky Way over Badlands National Park

Our next stops in 1972 were the Black Hills and Mt. Rushmore National Memorial. I remember seeing the destruction from the flood that had hit Rapid City a few weeks before killing over 200 people. I was struck that the devastation I’d seen in pictures on the news was confined to an area along the river and not the destruction of the whole city I had envisioned. Travel puts places and events in a special context that books, pictures or even movies cannot provide.

From there we drove to Devils Tower National Monument and I saw prairie dogs for the first time. It wouldn’t be too many years before I’d be surprised to see Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Time, and I could think, “I’ve been there.” With travel, time and events continue to fold back on each other as well as provide glimpses of new horizons to wonder about. On to Yellowstone—Part 2 next week.

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, New Mexico

In 1853, Major J.H. Carlton exploring the new addition to the United States from Mexico along the Rio Grande Valley in western New Mexico came across Abo of which he wrote, “The tall ruins standing there in solitude, had an aspect of sadness and gloom.” He recognized the ruins of a Christian church but didn’t realize the centuries of habitation of several cultures that had lived here.

Earlier this year, I posted images of the petroglyphs of the Jornada Mogollon who lived further east about 1,000 years ago. Some of them came to the Salinas Valley and joined with Ancestral Puebloans and forged a stable agricultural society with perhaps 10,000 people. The area became a major trade route between Mexico City and the Plains tribes in the east. By the 16th century, the Spanish colonizers took the route up from Mexico. The Spanish crown was disappointed in lack of riches they could exploit, so they gave permission to the Pope to let the Franciscans establish missions through the area. Today, Interstate 25 follows much of that route.

Next to church is a huge complex of structures where people lived, ate, stored food, and raised animals.

One mystery right near the church is a Kiva. Had this been a location of a Puebloan kiva, did the Franciscans build it to integrate the native’s beliefs with Christian ones, was it an effort to denigrate the native beliefs?

An arroyo runs through the area that provided water after monsoons and served as a quarry for the stones to build the structures.

The Franciscan mission lasted about fifty years, but by the 1670s the settlement was abandoned following Apache raids, Navajo revolts, and draught. The huge church and buildings that had been covered in plaster and paint began their deterioration.

A century and a half later, Spanish shepherds moved back near the ruins and built homes, fortifications and places for their animals. But these, too, were soon abandoned after attacks from the Apaches and added to the ruins when the American troops came into the area later in the century.

The Abo ruins are one of three sites for the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument established to preserve and remember this history.

One site, Gran Quivira had been established as a national monument in 1909, and the other two locations were incorporated in the expanded park in 1980. The third site Quarai has the largest remaining church structure. In this final image you can see the wooden beam put in place in 1626 to support the choir.

Quarai, Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, New Mexico

Upstate New York National Historical Parks

Fort Stanwix National Monument 1758 - 1790

Native Americans traveled a route through the Mohawk Valley connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Ontario, and called this area the Oneida Carrying Place. British General Stanwix built a fort here in 1758 to prevent French army invasions further south. After the French and Indian War, the old fort was used by the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Here the Six Nations Confederacy ceded lands east and south of the Ohio River to the British colonists, setting a pattern that would continue for the next century and a half.

In 1776 Congress ordered General Washington to rebuild the fort to protect the northwest border. The fort was renamed Fort Schuyler, for Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler, who lived not far away. In 1976, the town of Rome, NY and the National Park Service rebuilt the fort to its Revolutionary War look. I was not expecting much at this smaller monument right in the middle of the city of Rome, and was quite surprised with the impressive reconstructed fort and displays inside.

Ft. Stanwix National Monument

British and Indian troops coming from Lake Erie brought siege against the fort in 1777, until Benedict Arnold brought reinforcements to the fort and the British retreated. The battle prevented the British troops from continuing down the Mohawk Valley and joining Gen. Burgoyne’s troops who were coming south down the Hudson River. Their fate is described in the next section.

After the Revolution, the new country took Native hostages, and coerced a new treaty at the fort ceding native claims to lands in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio in 1784. New York State continued to use the fort for councils and treaties with native tribes in 1788 and 1790. A location that had been a trading and meeting place for thousands of years became a site that would establish a pattern and practice to exterminate those people.

Ft. Stanwix barracks

Saratoga National Historical Park 1777

British General Burgoyne believed he could sever the Revolutionary forces in half by invading down the Hudson River from Canada. Gen. Philip Schuyler (whose middle daughter Eliza would marry Alexander Hamilton) commanded the Northern Department of the U.S. Army and was charged with delaying Burgoyne. By the time the British troops got near Schuyler’s home near Saratoga, Gen. Horatio Gates took command of the U.S. troops.

After the battle, the British burnt down Schuyler’s nearby home which was immediately rebuilt.

Philip Schuyler home, Saratoga National Historical Park

The Americans, with significant help by Polish Col. Tadeusz Kosciuszko, established fortified positions over the Hudson River preventing Burgoyne from going further down the river and from taking the nearby road. He was forced to move his forces between the river and the fortified hills and the battle began.

Battlefield trail, Saratoga National Historical Park

After a battle on September 19, 1777, Burgoyne dug in and awaited reinforcements. When they never came, and it appeared American reinforcements were coming, the decisive battle began on October 7 and continued for ten days. A significant hero of the battle was Gen. Benedict Arnold, and when he failed to get the credit he felt he was due, turned traitor.

Burgoyne eventually surrendered on October 17, and the northern campaign was over.

A ten mile auto tour circles the battlefield. However, several miles of trails wind through the battlefield, and sign posts display numbers for an audio tour that place you in the midst of the events.

Saratoga Battlefield

Harriet Tubman National Historical Park 1859 - 1913

Central Upstate New York was a hub for abolition and women’s suffrage. Frances Seward, wife of Senator and former Governor William Seward, was a fierce abolitionist and participant in the Underground Railroad. She got to know Harriet Tubman who had escaped from slavery in 1849, and became a major figure in helping other enslaved people escape. Eventually, Tubman moved to Ontario with her parents and husband who she had helped escape.

Harriet Tubman, adopted daughter Gertie, husband Nelson Davis, and other residents of her home.

Frances convinced her husband to sell a farm they owned just outside of Auburn, New York to Tubman. Although the transaction was illegal under New York law, he sold the farm to her in 1859. She would move her family out of Canada and live on the property until her death in 1913.

Tubman and her family used the house and farm to assist freed Blacks in establishing new lives in the North. She eventually purchased 25 acres adjacent to her farm where she hoped to build a Home for the Aged, but never could get it going. She sold it to the A.M.E. Zion church who were then able to establish the Harriet Tubman Home for the Elderly, and she moved into the Home in 1911.

Harriet Tubman Home

The National Park Service acquired the home in 2017, and together with the A.M.E. Zion Church are restoring the Home for the Aged and residence. Due to Covid-19 and the construction, the temporary visitor center and home are closed, but outside tours are conducted by church and NPS staff.

Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, Auburn, New York

Pennsylvania Parks --1754, 1789-1832, 1834-57, 1889

Five national park sites stretch across about 120 miles in southwest Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. Four of those sites commemorate people and events from colonial through industrial times. The fifth site commemorates an event early in this century which will be visited in a future post.

Friendship Hill National Historic Site 1789-1832

Five years after Swiss-born Albert Gallatin emigrated to America in 1780, he became a citizen by swearing allegiance to the State of Virginia. The next year he bought a 370 acre farm on the western edge of the new country on a hill rising above the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania.

After helping draft the Pennsylvania constitution, he was elected as U.S. Senator and then Congressman. He expanded his farm to over 1,000 acres, built his home and established factories in the area. As he promoted western development of the new country, Thomas Jefferson selected him as his Treasury Secretary, where he helped finance the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and development of a national road and canal system. He continued in the position under President Madison and remains the longest serving Secretary of Treasury. His statue stands outside the U.S. Treasury building. When I worked for the Treasury Employees Union, the Gallatin Award was the highest achievement a member could receive.

Albert Gallatin

He served on the delegation for the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812, served as U.S. Minister to France and Great Britain, and helped establish New York University. He published many studies on Native American Indian languages and tribes, and theorized on their movement to the continent from Asia. In 1843, at age 83, he declined President Tyler’s request to again serve as Treasury Secretary. By 1832, he sold his western properties including Friendship Hill. He died in 1849.

Oak Allee entrance to Friendship Hill

Friendship Hill

The park has over nine miles of trails through woods and along the Monongahela River. When we visited, a nearby high school was celebrating homecoming, so the grounds were filled with teenagers in high fashion recalling the soiree Gallatin held on the grounds for the Revolutionary hero the Marquis de Lafayette as huge crowds greeted him across America.

Friendship Hill NHS river trail

Ft. Necessity National Battlefield 1754, 1827

The opening battle of the French and Indian War was fought at Fort Necessity in 1754. After his commander was killed, 22 year old George Washington was promoted to colonel, and he commanded the small fort and stockade his troops built in the Great Meadows, an unusually open area in the wooded terrain. About 25 miles from Friendship Hill sits Fort Necessity.

Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Pennsylvania

Washington commanded nearly 400 British American troops, but he failed to retain his Indian allies. After a nearly all day battle on July 3 against a larger French and Indian force, Washington surrendered for the only time in his career. The loss of the battle and many soldiers significantly affected his command of American forces twenty years later. The French and British would continue to fight across the Ohio River valley, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic, India and Europe for the next nine years—and call the conflict the Seven Years’ War. Hmmm.

National Road Heritage Corridor — Mount Washington Tavern

The park site also commemorates the National Road that Albert Gallatin helped lead to passage through Congress. Construction began in 1811 in Cumberland, Maryland, and ended in 1839 in Vandalia, Illinois by the state capitol before it moved that year to Springfield. The construction of the National Road to that western outpost undoubtedly influenced Abraham Lincoln who was then serving his one term in Congress and working for national infrastructure expansion. (Coincidently, Vandalia and Friendship Hill are both located in counties named “Fayette”—two of many locations across the country named for the Revolutionary hero after his tour of the country.

The tavern shown above was one of the first buildings along the National Road. George Washington had acquired the lands around the old battlefield, and it was eventually sold to Judge Nathaniel Ewing who built this tavern in 1827 on the edge of the battlefield next to the new Road.

Johnstown Flood National Memorial 1889

For now we’ll go past the next National Memorial for a later visit and head on another 70 miles to the site of the May 31, 1889 dam break and flood that was one of our country’s greatest disasters leaving over 2,200 dead in a flash.

Unger Farmhouse, Johnstown Flood National Memorial

The Unger Farmhouse overlooked Lake Conemaugh formed by the earthen dam across the South Fork of the Conemaugh River. When the dam was repaired and raised in 1879, engineers recommended improving the outlets to drain high water. The recommendations were ignored. Unger was president of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club and wealthy industrialists from Pittsburgh built “cottages” above the lake. Heavy rains in May continued until the water finally went over the top of the dam since there were inadequate outlets. At 3:10 p.m. the dam broke with 20 million tons of water and debris 75 feet high flying down the river wiping out bridges, towns, train tracks, and within an hour reached Johnstown.

Former dam wall

The large mill town, on one end of the Allegheny Portage Railroad was destroyed leaving thousands homeless and causing rampant disease. Clara Barton led the American Red Cross on its first major relief effort here as a flood of help came from around the world.

Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site 1834-1857

The National Road was but one effort to open access to the West. New York State opened the Erie Canal in 1825 to link the coast with the Great Lakes. Pennsylvania’s effort to catch up was called the Main Line of Public Works. In 1832, Philadelphia began expanding its new railroad 82 miles west to Columbia on the Susquehanna River. There a canal was being built to take traffic further west. Meanwhile, another canal was being built east of Pittsburgh to Johnston. The problem: 36 miles and the 3,000 foot tall Allegheny Mountains stood between the two canals.

Engine House 6 on the summit of the Allegheny Portage

The solution was to create a railroad line that was like the canal’s locks to connect the two canals and take boats, goods and passengers between the canals. The train tracks would go up five inclines on each side of the summit with levels in between — a railroad to portage the canal traffic.

Interpretive Ranger stone cutting demonstration

The tracks were laid on huge stone blocks that would be quarried along the track. Using hand drills, the immigrant workers broke off stone blocks, hewed them to the correct shape and attached anchors for the tracks to be attached to. A full 12 hour work day would produce one stone.

Stone cutting

In addition to the locomotives moving freight and passengers up each level and incline, there would be an engine house at the top of the incline where stationary steam engines would raise and lower rail cars by hemp cord and then iron cords.

Engine House 6

Passengers and crew would have breaks of 10 to 20 minutes at the engine houses when the freight was transferred from one incline to the next. Like today’s rest stops on Interstate Highways, taverns would open to serve the passengers and workers. The Lemon House Tavern was built in the 1830s.

Lemon House Tavern, Allegheny Portage National Historic Site

The central hallway would be the primary stop, though men could head to the bar or ladies and children to the parlor, or those with more time to the dining room.

Dining Room - Lemon House Tavern

My bridge engineer son tells me skew bridges are among the most challenging to design. Not unlike today’s contract bidding, the railroad line and local government had differing requirements and challenges for the engineers. The bridge to take the old wagon turnpike over the railroad tracks would need to be angled—or skewed—to satisfy both since the train tracks needed to be a straight line and the wagons couldn’t make right angle turns. A century later when a highway would be built, the road engineers had to figure out how to preserve the historically significant bridge and rail line, so the bridge still stands, now in the median of the roadway.

The mountain was conquered, and the Allegheny Portage Railroad was completed in 1834 and operated until 1857. The 23 day trip from between Philly and Pittsburgh was cut to four days. Hope you enjoyed the ride.

Skew Arch Bridge

Daniel Popper's Human + Nature

Dan suggested an early morning visit to the new outdoor sculpture exhibit at Morton Arboretum to enjoy it in new light and light crowds. When he saw this one, he said it was his sister-in-law Kelly. It sure looks like her last month in her last month of holding on to Hailey.

The sculptor Daniel Popper named this work Umi, which means life in Swahili and mother in Arabic. You can see the small Virginia Creepers planted near her roots. It will be great to see how this changes as Mother Nature envelopes Mother Nature.

Umi is one of the five sculptures by South African Daniel Popper at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois. It’s the largest ever exhibit of his work. You walk through the trails and among the trees to encounter these.

Heartwood

Heartwood opens to you to reveal patterns inside. Can you see what shows?

Can you see the fingerprint on one side and the tree rings on the other?

A closer encounter with prints is on the one piece that does not have a human face. Hands, arms, vines and roots envelope you in Basilica.

Basilica

I think the oaks surrounding are enjoying the exhibit as well. No one on Instagram reacted to my speculation that Popper named the piece made from silica of a friend named Basil. Thumbs up?

Here’s a brief video with Popper: “Accessing the depth of what it means to be human, what it means to be sentient, what it means to be alive, what it means to be here on this planet.”

Sentient

“If we start to look deep, deep inside our human nature, we’ll find that it’s extremely close to the natural world around us.” Daniel Popper

Hopefully, you might’ve had a chance to see the Trolls while they were at the Arboretum. They’re gone now, and these five pieces will be here for a year or so, changing with the seasons, and a couple of then joining with the vines planted with them.

Hallow

So much to enjoy with the detail, massiveness, mystery, and engagement.

And open your heart.

Camp Nelson National Monument, Kentucky

Previously protected as a state heritage site, Camp Nelson was established as Kentucky’s first National Monument in 2018. Twenty miles south of Lexington, the Monument preserves the location where tens of thousands of enslaved people emancipated themselves. Here’s the entrance from the highway which was the main road even prior to the Civil War.

The camp was established in early 1863 as a supply depot in preparation for the U.S. Army’s campaign into eastern Tennessee and through the Cumberland Gap (more images from the Cumberland Gap in future posts.) The Depot Trail at the Monument explains the huge amount of supplies of beans, coffee, horses, wagons, etc. that supported union troops that was conveyed through Camp Nelson. The bakery made nearly 7 tons of bread a day, though most of that was consumed by the soldiers and staff at the camp itself.

So who built the camp? A great portion of the fortification, warehouses, and barracks were built by paying Kentucky slaveholders to use their enslaved peoples. How’s that possible when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863? The Proclamation freed people enslaved in states that rebelled against the United States, and Kentucky was not a rebel state so slavery was legal there. In the image below are the remains of one fort on the perimeter of the camp which was built primarily by 3,000 slaves while their owners were paid for their labor.

The army began to use the camp to train black men who escaped from Confederate states to join the army. Again this did not apply to enslaved blacks in Kentucky. However, Kentucky was not meeting its quota of supplying white men as soldiers, so in March 1864 the governor signed an order that Kentucky slaveholders could voluntarily agree to let their slaves join the army—and get paid $300 for each one who did. Nevertheless without their slavemaster’s consent, many Kentucky slaves escaped to the camp to join the army. The army then permitted vigilante squads into the camp to seize these fugitives. The ensuing violence led General Lorenzo Thomas to order that all black males could enter the camp to become soldiers, and eventually over 10,000 enslaved men obtained their freedom this way.

However, this emancipation only applied to the men who enlisted in the U.S. Colored regiments. Women, children, and those not eligible to serve could not be freed. These people were called refugees, and had no certain legal status and were still considered runaway slaves. The refugees were allowed to live in a shanty village that grew within the camp. Also, many white families from unionist Eastern Tennessee became refugees in the camp as the men enlisted in the Union Army and formed white Tennessee Union regiments. Only one structure from the Civil War era remains. The Oliver Perry house was built in the 1840s, and the Army converted the house to officer quarters when the camp was established, and returned it to the family after the War.

Kentucky slaveowners pressured the Army to end the refugee status of their slaves, and in late November 1864 Commander Speed Fry ordered soldiers to forcibly remove the refugees from the camp—many the wives and children of union soldiers—and to burn down the refugee camp. Soon over 100 of the expelled refugees died of exposure and disease. Camp Nelson Chief Quartermaster Hall and a neighboring abolitionist minister began a campaign of protest. On November 28, the New York Tribune ran a front page story writing: “At this moment, over four hundred helpless human beings....having been driven from their homes by United States soldiers, are now lying in barns and mule sheds, wandering through the woods....literally starving, for no other crime than their husbands and fathers having thrown aside the manacles of Slavery to shoulder Union muskets.” Fry’s supervisor ordered the policy of expulsion be reversed, and Secretary of War Stanton ordered that all refugees, regardless of ties to the Union Army be given permanent protection in the camp.

The Union Army was moving further south into Confederate territory and General Grant wanted to close Camp Nelson. However, General Sherman said the training grounds and refugee protection was still important and the camp remained open. Former soldier barracks started being converted into quarters for the refugees. None of the barracks remain, but the Kentucky Heritage society rebuilt one for use as a visitor center which is now closed because of Covid-19.

By December 1964, the army called much of the area the Home for Colored Refugees, and built a mess hall, dormitory, school, and teachers quarters. In March 1865, Congress passed legislation freeing the wives and children of U.S. Colored Troops. By the time of the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865 prohibiting slavery throughout the county, over 10,000 black soldiers had already earned their freedom through enlistment at Camp Nelson.

Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area

I’m continually amazed and inspired when I’m in my backyard and hear the call of sandhill cranes, and look up and far above are lines of the birds migrating. Their ancient call is so loud that even when they are small dots thousands of feet up their sound travels to the ground. They summer in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada, and then head to Florida and Georgia for the winter. Thousands stop in northwest Indiana for a few weeks to rest and eat the grain in the fields before moving on.

They spend the night in water to keep away from coyotes and other predators, and then take off at dawn to head to the fields. Jasper-Pulaski Fish & Wildlife Area has some expansive protected land for them. The birds often assemble in the large field in front of a viewing platform, before scattering to the fields. Unfortunately, when I visited Friday, they just headed out without the intermediate stop. Still there was some nice changing color in the sky.

Looking east, they’d silhouette in the rising sun.

The clear sky allowed their feathers to be illuminated by the rising sun.

The cranes mate for life, and their chicks stay with them for over a year. You’ll often notice that they’ll fly together as a pair or a family group of three or four.

If you’re below the migration route, listen for the call and look up. Or if you’re up for a sunrise or sunset trip, head over to Jasper-Pulaski and watch a natural wonder.

Riverwalk

The grid streets of Chicago are built on a precise east-west axis, so at the spring and fall equinox, the sun rises and sets straight between the buildings lining the streets. I went downtown to capture the event, but the conditions were not good, so I headed to the riverwalk to see whether something interesting would be there.

Clark Street Bridge

In 1887, a mammoth engineering project reversed the flow of the Chicago River so it would flow out of, rather than into, Lake Michigan. The project also aligned the flow along the east-west street axis. The low sun coming along the river and through the buildings and along the Chicago River spotlighted a few scenes.

444 West Lake Street

333 West Lake Street

Quite a few walkers, runners and dogs were enjoying the morning light.

One of the best tours in Chicago is the architecture boat tour down the river. There’s a great mix of old and new, and one of the best older buildings is the Reid-Murdoch built in 1914, which long held the city traffic court and other departments.

The reflections in the cover under the bridges and on the water caught my eye.

Under the Clark Street Bridge

It was time to play with that light on the water.

Look long enough and there are figures in the water. A dog?

An alien and a shark?

Or someone just observing all the play of light and color.

Don't Travel Tuesday: Flightless

Six months ago, at the beginning of the quarantine, I posted images of newly budding elm trees covered in a late snow, and of walks close to home. We still walk daily by these elm trees.

The leaves are showing their age and beginning to yellow. The black walnut nearby is covering the ground in nuts, you stop under an oak and hear the acorns drop, and the squirrels running through the branches.

Walking by Mike and Mary’s elm a couple weeks ago, the blue jays were screeching and cawing a storm. Soon the neighborhood red shouldered hawk flew from a nearby tree and perched in the elm. We watched him sit on a branch harassed by the jays who were letting everyone know where the predator sat. Walking Chance under the tree, I said that Fritzy, my dog as a boy, would lay in the grass outside our back door under the palm trees by the bird feeders. When the blue jays were ready to eat, or just out of spite, they would gather round and begin screeching. They would take turns diving at Fritzy until he would get up and sleepily move away from the feeder.

We walked under the same tree a couple days ago. Lying by the trunk was a newly dead blue jay. He was far from a window, a not uncommon cause of a broken neck. Had the hawk killed him, he would’ve been food and just a pile of feathers that are another not uncommon sight. Instead, he just peacefully lay on the grass.

In my post last March, I included a part of a 1963 poem by Carl Sandburg describing new elm buds as yellow and gold mice. Had Sandburg written about blue jays? Google said he had, much earlier in 1920: A long, beautiful, strange poem Slabs of the Sunburnt West of his journeying on a train and looking at the forms and colors in the Grand Canyon. He saw a jay sitting on the chair of the maker of the canyon.

An arm-chair for a one-eyed giant;
two pine trees grow in the left arm of the chair;
a bluejay comes, sits, goes, comes again;
a bluejay shoots and twitters . . . out and across . . .
tumbled skyscrapers and wrecked battleships,
walls of crucifixions and wedding breakfasts;
ruin, ruin — a brute gnashed, dug, kept on —
kept on and quit: and this is it.

A repeating lyric in the poem is Sandburg’s vision of the colors of the jay and the mouse in the canyon walls.

A bluejay blue
and a gray mouse gray
ran up the canyon walls

I brought the blue jay home. I was planting bulbs for color for next spring. Nearby, last spring I planted a lilac. A red grossbeak had hit one of our windows, so when I dug the place for the bush, the bird went first, and then some dirt before the plant. Now a place for the blue jay, and then some dirt, and then the bulbs. In the spring when the lilac and grape hyacinths bloom, the colors of birds will add their song.

Castle tours

A year ago we toured castles throughout the central belt, Highlands and Perthshire. The bug bit hard, and I visited more Scotish castles on my own. Some of these are now prints in our living room. Kilchurn sits on a peninsula of Loch Awe and is surrounded by marshy land. It was first built in the mid-15th century and abandoned in the 18th and remains a beautiful ruin.

Kilchurn Castle

One of our favorites is Doune Castle where most of Monty Python & the Holy Grail was filmed along with scenes from Outlander and Game of Thrones. The audio tour offered at many of the castles are terrific, but the one at Doune is so much fun with clips from the movies and narration by actors sharing their experiences in the castle while filming. You can look out the windows, and see “huge tracts of land.”

Doune castle window

Unfortunately, pictures cannot capture the furious winds that can blow especially on the castles positioned on top of high points. It felt like walking through hurricane winds to get to Auchindoun. It too was built in the mid-15th century, and before the end of the century was attacked and burned by Clan Macintosh. As referenced in this poem, it’s near Glen Fiddich, so you can raise a toast if you wish.

Heid me or hang me, that shall never fear me
A'll burn Auchindoun tho' the life leave me

As A cam in bi Fiddichside on a May mornin
Auchindoun was in a bleeze, an hour before the dawning

Auchindoun castle

One of the readers of this blog suggested I visit his clan’s castle of Craigevar. This was occupied into the 1960s, and is said to have served as inspiration for Disney’s Cinderella castle.

Craigevar Castle

One of the most dramatic settings is Dunnottar Castle which is on a promontory jutting out to the North Sea. A castle was first built here in the 1390s, though the grounds has ruins of a chapel built in 1276. Brutal history can been found in many castles, but one of the worst was the holding of 167 political prisoners known as Coventors in this vault from May through July 1685 with minimal food, water or sanitation.

Whigs’ Vault, Donnottar Castle

A more peaceful scene awaits at Stirling Castle. We couldn’t get in until the spring snow was cleared from the slippery, rocky walkways, but we could watch the snow coming down on the spectacular King James IV Great Hall built in 1503. Most of these castles are now under the care of Historic Environment Scotland. If you ever visit and plan to see more than one castle or other site, be sure to buy a membership.

Another castle on in a dramatic setting is Eilean Donan (Island of St. Donan) on the Kyle of Lochalsh. First built in the 13th century, the ruins were reconstructed in the 20th, and have served as a background for many movies.

Eilean Donan castle

Huntingtown Tower was originally two separate towers less than ten feet apart, likely built by feuding brothers. Eventually the two towers were joined together. During royal intrigue, King James VI was held here against his will for ten months when he was 16. After James’ escape, his captor lost his head at Sterling outside the Great Hall James’ grandfather built.

Huntington Tower Castle

Last evening in Edinburgh

Last March, my photography trip to the Outer Hebrides was cut short, and I returned to Edinburgh where Caroline and I packed so she could leave the University, and not know what the future would be like. We put our luggage in a nearly vacant hotel, and took an evening walk through the quiet streets of the capitol city. We were on the Royal Mile, so we first headed up to the castle for an unusual sight of no one around the imposing entrance.

Edinburgh Castle

The castle is on an ancient volcanic plug and dominates the city. A mile long ridge connects the castle mount to Holyrood Palace a mile away. About half way along the Royal Mile is St. Giles Cathedral, where John Knox preached and what is called the Mother Church of Presbyterians. Building was begun in the 14th Century, finished in the 16th, and significantly remodeled in the 19th. Outside is a statue of the Duke of Beccleuch, whose name was Walter Scott, and whose guardian was the writer Sir Walter Scott, who has a much more imposing memorial in the city himself.

St. Giles Cathedral and the Duke of Buccleuch

With the sun behind us we continued east on the empty sidewalks.

Royal Mile shadows

Eventually we could see the other volcanic ridge that overlooks the western side of the city known as Arthur’s Seat. A beautiful park surrounds the peak and hike up offers a beautiful view of Old Town.

Arthur’s Seat

However, we decided to head to another location neither of has been to. Calton Hill offers another view over Edinburgh. We could look over Waverly train station back to the castle. On the right edge of image is the imposing Victorian memorial to Sir Walter Scott. It’s the world second largest memorial to a writer. You’d need to travel to Havana to see the larger one to José Martí.

View from Calton Hill

The Scott Memorial is on Princess Street, and from there to the north is New Town Edinburgh which is one of the world’s first effort at urban planning. The medieval town maze was crowded and wealthy citizens were leaving, so a competition was held to build a new town. In 1766, twenty-six year old James Craig designed a grid system of streets, homes and businesses. It took a century to complete the Georgian complex. Some students had a relaxing view into New Town and out to the Firth of Forth.

New Town Edinburgh

TIme for us to head down Calton Hill along Leith Street toward Princess Street and back to Old Town for our last night in the city. Caroline is back and now enjoying her last two weeks in Scotland while finishing her Masters.

Leith Street to Princess Street