Just Because...

I was shopping for a pet flotation vest for Wiley at CampMor (why? Maybe he needs one... that's all I'll say at this juncture) when I saw this photo for a product that was on sale.






Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that CampMor felt compelled to note "dog not included"?

Colorado Geologic Survey Rocks!

I'm sure you've also been losing sleep over my obsession with the rock formation I saw a couple days ago.

I emailed the Colorado Geologic Survey and sent the photos, not really expecting to hear back because I only had the general e-ddress for them. To my delight, I got a reply today... and not just a form letter, but an actual reply from an actual geologist who gave me props! Whoo hoo!

Here is his answer (in my original email, I had mentioned my theory that the formation was a tertiary igneous dike):

[Pirate], good observation. That is a "radial dike," just like at the Spanish Peaks. Magma feeding a volcano filled in fissures that spread radially out from the throat of the volcano. The solidified rock is much more resistant to erosion than the surrounding material so becomes preserved. Those were some great photos, with the snow. I have photographed that feature several times and I never got a photo as good as those. Maybe I can use those sometime (with permission and with credit provided.)

Jim Burnell
Minerals Geologist
Colorado Geological Survey

Yee hah! I don't know if it means my life is so lame that getting a reply about a rock formation can make my day, but I'll take it.

And now I can rest easier know it's just a radial dike and not a portal to a fourth dimension kingdom run by flying monkeys. Because, you know, the thought had crossed my mind.

A Celebrity Chef to Celebrate

By now you've probably heard about (and seen) Christopher Walken's video of how to roast a chicken with pears on ImCooked.com ... if not, check it out here.

I'd watch his cooking show any day.

Chris, if you need an assistant/guest pastry chef, call me.

My New Obsession

On a paved but lonely county road along the Divide, driving just because it was a nice early evening after work and I wanted to let Wiley stick his head out the window a bit, I saw the most fascinating rock formation.

Here it is shot from the southwest:

Here it is from the south:

Here it is from the southeast:

I don't know how much you can tell from the photos, but it is a perfectly straight rock wall that goes all the way up the mountain, perfectly perpendicular to the ground. There was no continuation on the other side of the road, but around a bend I was able to see tips of it continuing north, not as fully eroded.

It was so intriguing, its engineering perfection, the sudden end of it on the south but going on for who knows how long to the north.

I went online and could find zero information on it, which made it all the more intriguing. I did waste half an hour of my life on Google Earth zooming in and out to see how far the ridge continues (Google Earth, by the way, may be the deadliest timesucker ever invented... that's why I'm not including the link. Save yourself. It's too late for me. Ooh! Let's zoom in and out on Ute Mountain and then zip over to Grand Mesa, the world's largest flat-top mountain!)

Anyway, I drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park to see if a ranger up there who's answered all my pesky questions in the past could help. He knew exactly what I was talking about, but not what it was. We paged through a couple geology books in the store but the closest thing we could find was a photo of a similar, though less dramatic formation, labeled as "tertiary igneous dikes" near a mountain in the San Juans.

I emailed the Colorado Geologic Survey but haven't heard back yet. What is it?? I must know!

Okay, back to pastry...

A Few More Photos

Here are a couple more shots of our trip to Four Corners...

Ever vigiliant Wiley looks toward Ute Mountain while guarding the new tent.

We camped at Hovenweep National Monument, which apparently isn't visited as often as Mesa Verde, even though it's only an hour or so away. Hovenweep is surrounded by the Canyons of the Ancients Monument, an area that allegedly includes more than 6,000 known archeological sites. The canyon near the campground apparently has the largest concentration of these sites, mostly from the 11th-13th century, built around the same time as the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde.

I say "apparently" and "allegedly" because there was something odd about the whole area. Aside from the aforementioned canyon, which was well-marked and right beside the visitor's center, it was really hard to find any maps or brochures or online information or road signs to the other sites. Part of it is that Hovenweep itself is part of the National Park Service, but the rest of the area is under the Bureau of Land Management. I don't know if the BLM is as unorganized as I've heard, but this didn't help their image in my eyes.

I also felt, I dunno, that things are kept intentionally vague because "de Arkies" would rather people go to the carefully controlled Mesa Verde than wander around the desert near where cannibal sites have been found.

In any case, here's a shot of "Hovenweep Castle," one of the larger sites within the main canyon:

And here's a look at another portion of the canyon to give you an idea of how closely the sites are clustered. Check out the "Boulder House" in the left-center of the shot, below the rim. It's actually a house built into a partly-collapsed boulder lodged precipitously on a ledge. Oh yeah, I would have had more than one sleepless night living in that thing!

Especially knowing there were cannibals nearby...

Cannibalism Alert

The lovely and talented Dr. Virago recently questioned Ranger Craig's claims of cannibalism among Chaco culture outlier sites, pointing out in a comment to the post, and rightfully so, that tour guides are not always to be trusted.

I should know. I've been a tour guide and oh, the tales I've told. Not only that, but when she and I went hiking on the Isle of Man, we did have a couple of tour guides at medieval sites who excelled in truthiness.

So I did a little research. If, like me, your interest in Mormon chick hair and making homemade skyr is bested only by a deep fascination with cannibalism, here's some, er, food for thought that supports Ranger Craig's statements.

Mormons, Kivas, but Not Nearly Enough Cannibals

Here are some shots from the Mesa Verde trip mentioned in a post on Tuesday from the middle of nowhere! I would have posted them that night, but my laptop battery decided that 10 p.m. was lights out time. As with the previous shots of Wiley, you should be able to click on each image to enlarge it, if you so choose.

This is the Cliff Palace, the largest of the Ancient Puebloan (Pueblan?) cliff dwelling complexes and the only one of the ranger-guided tour ones open this time of year.

I was really surprised by how much both the general landscape and architecture reminded me of similar dwellings I've seen on Sardinia... one major difference is the number of people. I had the Sardinian sites to myself, but here, even on a weekday in mid-April, there were about two dozen people on the tour. And the ranger said it was nice to have such a small group. In summer, he said the "tsunami" arrives and 60 people go down every half-hour all day. Yikes.

I really liked our ranger, Craig, but for the first half of the tour I was trying to figure him out. He had blue eyes and red hair and a lot of sun damage, very Anglo, but he had that great cadence and enunciation that a lot of Native Americans have. As an aside, that's one of my favorite American accents, if it can be considered that (or is it its own dialect?). There's something very appealing about it. And yes, Ranger Craig is the guy who told me I looked like I knew what I was doing.

Anyway, eventually he started mentioning his "people" and his "clan" and said at the end of the tour that he was Zuni, with "some Scottish and Irish somewhere along the way." Nice guy, but after that all I could think of was how much it had to have sucked being a fair-skinned redhead growing up in the Four Corners without sunscreen. Ouch.

Sure, this is a shot of a kiva, the ceremonial underground chamber that had an ingenious ventilation system... or is it?? It's also a shot of the Mormon not-quite-fundamental family on the tour with us. They also had Gramps and Granny in tow, though Gramps stayed in the minivan for the tour. I ran into him on a trail later in the day and said hello and he just glared at me. Maybe his daughter or daughter-in-law or whatever told him I had been staring at her hair for much of the tour. It wasn't quite as lush as the Texas compound Mormon chicks, but it was close. I do believe, however, there were styling products involved.

Would Jesus Use Mousse?

In any case, I took this photo as Ranger Craig was informing us, complete with hand gestures, about how the Pueblo culture regarded the earth as mother and womb and female and the sky as male and the spring rain as consummation. I can only guess what they were thinking.

Here's a shot of the ladders and general trail getting in and out of the site. Really not that big a deal, and nothing compared to some of the stuff I've encountered hiking. Remember, the Mormon chick did it too, in a skirt, with 20 or so kids clinging to her. I was dying to see how she went up the ladder modestly in a skirt, but I wound up talking to the ranger and a bunch of old people got ahead of me, so I missed it. But I'm sure it was chastely.

Another view of the Cliff Palace, taken from the Sun Temple, giving you a little more context to the site. Craig the Ranger dismissed Sun Temple as "one of those Chaco sites," a tribe he seemed to pawn off all the nastier bits of history on. He mentioned one intriguing nearby site... there is a mountain called The Sleeping Ute, because it kinda, if you really use your imagination and don't have cable, looks like a sleeping man (Ute is one of the regional tribes, or nations... not quite sure of the correct terminology). Archeologists (or "de Arkies," as Ranger Craig called them) found a site in the "toe" of the Sleeping Ute that had human bones that had been split with axes, cut up and also "stirred in a pot." Ranger Craig swore that science had proven conclusively that the bones had been stirred in a pot, though I would love to know how they figured that one out.

Anyway, the ever-thorough Arkies went one step further and analyzed feces found in the site's fire pit and concluded it was not only human poop, but that the human poop had human proteins in it that could only have come from eating other humans.

Ranger Craig emphasized that the Toe site had nothing to do with "his people" and that it was an outlier site of Chaco culture. Of course. There's apparently a whole gory book on the site, but I don't know the name. "Toe of Death" comes to mind as an obvious choice.

I asked later at a tourist info center on the road to Four Corners how I could get to the "toe" because I'd heard there were some interesting archeological sites there, but the women behind the counter blanched and told me it was on Ute land and off-limits to outsiders.

"They found bones that had been, you know, cannibalized there!" one said breathlessly.

Yes, and stirred in a pot!