Solstice—the Standing Still Sun

On December 21st, buried back there under the frantic ramp-up to Christmas, the Winter Solstice occurred. Beyond the astronomical explanations about the earth’s tilt and relation to the sun, much is made of the winter solstice’s age-old celebratory events. Festivals, feasts, yule logs, ancient carols, and modern celebrations, from Christmas to Hanukkah, have been linked to [...]

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Far View

In 1906 Congress established Mesa Verde National Park, the first to expand the parks concept beyond exclusively preserving scenic natural wonders (like Yellowstone), to include the “works of man.” In 1888 the Wetherills, a local ranching family, stumbled upon magnificent and mysterious cliff dwellings perched in caves up Mesa Verde’s canyon walls. Throughout the 1890s [...]

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Book Review: West of the Thirties, by Edward T. Hall

West of the Thirties, written 60 years after the events it records, chronicles the four summers a barely adult Edward T. Hall spent working on the Hopi and Navajo reservations of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. He was only 19 when he arrived to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1933. Hall [...]

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Riders of the Purple Sage

We are heading north across the Great Sage Plain—a gently rolling 1500 square mile plateau covered with wind-blown soil and gray-green scrubby sagebrush. It stretches across southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah and holds the highest density of prehistoric and historic sites in North America, according to the Bureau of Land Management. It’s thought that upwards of [...]

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Winter’s Closing In

This afternoon it is snowing here in Albuquerque. It’s at least an inch deep in my backyard. Just after 3:00 pm, it’s 27°. This is not standard end-of-October weather. Today’s average temperature is 65°. Yesterday, I sat in front of our first-of-the-season fire, reading up on Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado, where we’d taken a [...]

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Where Have All the Aspens Gone?

Last week we visited Mesa Verde in Southwestern Colorado. The homeplace to thousands of Ancestral Puebloans for 600 years, the mesatop stone cities and cliff palaces carved into canyon cliff walls were abandoned over the course of the final quarter of the 13th century. Why did they leave? A question with too many answers—extended drought, [...]

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Place by Flowing Waters: The Mother Pueblo at Aztec

I think there is nothing more distinctly Southwestern than our Ancient Puebloan Ruins. Built roughly 700 to 1000 years ago, they dot our sage, rabbitbrush and piñon/juniper mesatops, canyon floors and sandstone cliffs. They lie beneath thousands of mounts of southwest earth, where their stones or adobes have tumbled or melted. They are, it seems, [...]

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After the Rain

In September we camped at Hovenweep National Monument. Never heard of it? Don’t feel bad. Most people haven’t, including many of our Southwestern friends. Although it’s been a national monument since 1923, less than one million folks have ever visited. Hovenweep (Paiute/Ute for deserted valley) straddles the Utah/Colorado border in the Four Corners area, less [...]

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