Sunday, April 25, 2010

Snow and Water

Saturday Todd and I skiied up into Red Snow Cirque in the Central La Sals and got severely sunburnt and got some great spring skiing in. We got about 10 inches of new snow this week in the high country so instead of corn conditions we actually found great powder conditions.

Sunday we floated Westwater at 7,000 cfs. It was a great level. My back two passengers (Sam and Jess) got bucked off in Sock it To Me without the rest of the group even knowing. So as we were celebrating our clean run of the rapid Sam and Jess were struggling to get out from under the boat and get back in. Once we realized we were missing two crew members we pulled them out of the cold river and apologized for not noticing they were gone. Good trip, no photos.


Todd waiting for me and eating lunch in Red Snow Cirque

Perfect spring conditions on the glacial morraine. Tuk in the background

Tracks off the north ridge of Tuk
Todd skiing the north ridge back into Red Snow Cirque

Todd skiing into the white ocean of Red Snow Cirque

Comb Ridge

Last weekend we headed down to Comb ridge to watch the cottonwoods leaf out, listen to coyotes and look for more ruins of the Ancient Ones.


This is a ruin that I have been looking for for a few years and finally found it. It is amazingly well preserved and nearly impossible to get into. One of the things that intrigues me almost more than the structures themselves is there setting and the places these people chose to build their dwellings. This ruin is perched right on top a a 200 plus foot vertical cliff with a small set of steps chipped into the rocks to access them. The snow covered Abajos are in the background.


Me and the boys at the Eagle Nest


Monarch Cave


The Procession Panel. This panel has 179 anthropmorphs (human figures) walking in a long line.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Chaco and Aztec

We headed south to Northern New Mexico for Spring Break to escape the annual internal combustion invasion in Moab and hoping that if we went far enough south we would outrun the strong spring storm that was heading into Utah.

We did escape the parade of people looking at each others engines (i.e. Jeep Safari) but did not escape the storm. We were planning on camping near Bluff on the San Juan but when we got to Bluff it was a sand storm of biblical proportions so we drove on to Farmington,N.M. and got a room (and ate pretty good Thai food, who knew there was Thai in Farmington?). We woke up to a white out the next morning and headed to Aztec Ruins in Aztec N.M, hoping that the storm would let up and let us get to Chaco Canyon the next day.

I was glad we made it to Aztec as it is the largest of the Chaco Greathouse outliers and was an impressive site. The Great Kiva at Aztec was rebuilt in the 1920s to what they thought was its original style. It is a pretty amazing place.

The next day it was still snowing but we decided to still head to Chaco. We drove south out of Farmington and turned onto a dirt road at Nageezi, N.M. Part of the Chaco experience is driving out to the site and wondering why the Ancestral Puebloans ever decided to construct their largest communities in what seems to be the most inhospitable part of the entire Colorado Plateau (which is already an pretty inhospitable place.)

If you have any interest in the prehistoric cultures of the Southwest Chaco is Mecca, you have to go at least once to get a sense of the scale of the place and how it influenced so much of the region. The most elaborate burials excavated in the Southwest were found here, along with an immense amount of pottery, jewelery, macaws, copper bells and even chocolate.


Part of the Murdock Clan deep inside Pueblo Bonito, this area was probably 4 stories high, 800 years ago. It is considered the largest prehistoric structure in North America.



Mesa top view of the Kin Kletso Great House


Cold day in downtown Chaco

Pueblo Bonito

Hallways in the Aztec Great House