Bear's Ears Becomes a Reality! Now the Real Fight Must Begin

An incredible thing just happened, something I've always hoped for, but thought was well nigh impossible. The Bears Ears National Monument has become a reality! President Obama declared the monument under the authority of the Antiquities Act, which allows the president of the United States to protect endangered areas of cultural and natural importance.

Source: http://www.grandcanyontrust.org/bears-ears-national-monument-map

The new monument protects 1.35 million acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah between the San Juan River and Canyonlands National Park. It includes one of the most significant archaeological regions in the United States, preserving a record of human occupation going back thousands of years. Mesa Verde National Park and Chaco Canyon National Historical Park and others preserve spectacular cliff dwellings and cities, but they are relatively small parks that cannot provide a full record of the human history of the region. Cedar Mesa and other parts of the Bears Ears country have long been recognized as a critical repository of knowledge regarding the comprehensive history of the Ancestral Pueblo people. Their descendants still live in the region to this day, and it is they who have perhaps pushed hardest for the monument designation. The reasons are obvious: the archaeological record and the cultural history of the people is in clear danger of disappearing forever. Their heritage is being plundered.

For years, local people have been destroying archaeological sites hunting for pots and other artifacts to sell on the black market. It's literally part of the local economy. It's incredibly illegal, but the rangers of the Bureau of Land Management are too few to patrol the vast region, and they and their families have been threatened with increasing frequency. It was a situation that needed to be changed, and the designation of the monument offers some hope that these sites could be better protected from desecration.

It may be hard for some people to understand how profoundly disturbing the attack on a people's heritage can be. Years ago, when I was on a raft trip on the San Juan River, the oarsman, a local resident, described how he had a mummified child hidden in his garage, not to mention a number of pots and arrowheads. A mummified child! Perhaps one can imagine finding graveyards across the United States plundered on a regular basis, by people seeking jewelry or gold teeth. Imagine finding that a the body of a deceased son or daughter was on display in someone's personal "museum". Those are the kinds of stakes involved here.

It's a strange thing. The vast majority of the people of Utah (and the rest of the country) have indicated support for the Bears Ears. The vast majority of the Native Americans in the region support the protection of the region. They've worked for years to plan the boundaries and administration of the park. Those opposed? The Republican Congressional delegation. The governor of Utah, and the state legislature. Why? They want the land given to the state of Utah to be sold off, for mining, for logging, or simply to be sold off for state funding purposes. They've called it a "land grab", but these are lands that belonged first to the Native Americans of the region, and later, to the American people through the federal government under the Bureau of Land Management. It does not belong to the state of Utah, and they have no true claim to it. This land needs to be managed for the good of all the people of the country, not the privileged few. The monument designation is the best approach, but it would be a greater idea for congress to declare the region a national park.

The news of the establishment of the new monument is thrilling to a great many people, but Barack Obama is president only for a few more weeks, and the power of the presidency is going to pass on to a man who is neither knowledgeable or appreciative of the value of this land to the many stakeholders in the monument. Trump only understands money and profit, and there is little doubt that his administration will try to remove the protections afforded by the monument designation. Therefore, we have a fight ahead of us. I hope that you will follow news about the monument and help protect it. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is a good place to start. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition is another good resource.

I haven't said much about my personal motivation for supporting this new monument. For years, I have been taking students into this region to learn geology and anthropology. I've spent many happy hours exploring the canyons and mesas, and regard the region to be the center of my spiritual universe. One could spend a lifetime here.

The Valley of the Gods (above) is a small version of Monument Valley (only a few miles north of the actual Monument Valley). The road that winds through the region is a marvelous excursion, but it is just one of many explorations possible in the region. There are also vast areas of wilderness, including the famed Grand Gulch, site of some of the most spectacular rock art in the entire southwest (not to mention the hundreds of cliff dwellings).

Cedar Mesa makes up much of the southern half of the monument. Views from the edge provide an incredible panorama of some of the greatest scenery in the United States. For years we have camped at the southern edge of the mesa, with views of Monument Valley, Navajo Mountain, the Goosenecks of the San Juan River, and the Rocky Mountains. These features are case studies for the understanding of erosional processes in arid regions. The rocks themselves preserve fossils and structures dating from the late Paleozoic era to the Mesozoic era, a time of advancing and receding seas. The fossil record includes all kinds of marine animals, and terrestrial creatures, including the dinosaurs and their ancestors.

President Obama will leave behind an legacy as one of the greatest environmentalists in our country's history. He has established nearly 30 monuments covering millions of acres, a heritage that protects long neglected landscapes that represent the best of our country. I'm hopeful that the politicians of Utah will finally come to realize the treasure that they possess (there is, after all, plenty of money that can be made from the proper promotion of parks and monuments). One can only dig up the coal or uranium once before the resource is lost forever, and the land is wasted more or less for all time. This new national monument is a gift that will last through coming time, while simultaneously preserving the heritage of a people from times past. And under all of it lies the abyss of geologic time, as preserved in the rocks themselves. It is a precious land.

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: The fusion of geology and architecture, part 2

For today's post on the Abandoned Lands I am jumping into my personal "Wayback Machine" to revisit a hike I did in 2003 on Cedar Mesa, the western edge of the Ancestral Puebloan "fertile crescent". The crescent was (and still is) a highly productive agricultural area, and supported a large population between about 600 - 1,300 AD. We didn't do this hike on our more recent trip, but I thought it fit nicely with my theme of the fusion of rock and architecture. It remains one of the most memorable hikes of my life.

Access is the death-knell to Ancestral Puebloan ruins. The closer they are to roads, the more likely they are to be destroyed by pothunters and vandals (both of whom are the lowest of human beings). To see these wonderful ruins, we had to walk a total of eight miles, and that doesn't count the required climbing to approach the ruins themselves. There was only a trail of use to follow.

The trail began in a shallow canyon with an ephemeral stream. After a mile or so, the canyon deepened, and the first of the ruins appeared (above). It just goes to show how I can miss significant sights sometimes, by realizing that the ruin above is famous, and is found in posters and art exhibits. It's called the House on Fire Ruin (or some variant), and I totally missed the effect of the crossbedded Cedar Mesa Sandstone that flares out above the dwelling. Check out this page (or this one) for an example of a shot taken with a photographer's eye

The ruins in the canyon (there are eight or so of them spread over three miles) are in surprisingly nice condition, with intact walls, doorways and ceilings.

The dwelling in the pictures above and below even has an intact stairwell. This particular ruin is relatively inaccessible; people can get to it, but it requires a somewhat vertiginous crawl up some precariously perched logs on an 8 or 10 foot overhang. I haven't managed it yet in two tries (because I knew I had to get back down, and wasn't sure of myself).

Some of the alcoves don't have dwellings (anymore) but they do have pictographs, including the hand prints below. These messages communicate to me the humanity of a single individual who lived in this place 700+ years ago.

 There are also ghostly dancing figures...

I talked in previous posts of the frustration of having ruins that have been stabilized and "cleaned up". One starts to lose that sense of personal discovery (my so-called Indiana Jones effect; it's addictive and not really good archaeology). Of course it makes sense that a park with high visitation would never leave artifacts out in plain sight. They would disappear quickly. Here, miles from the end of the road, people have decently left things in place for others to see.

 The remnants of some kind of woven yucca fibers, a moccasin maybe?

Corncobs, minus the corn (rodents are very active in these ruins). The Ancestral Puebloans subsisted on maize, beans and squash, with the occasional supplementary meat provided by rabbits, deer, and bighorn sheep.

The upper canyon held what was to me one of the most fascinating dwellings I've run across (below). It's in a side canyon choked with willows and brush. Except for the fact that I knew a dwelling was up there somewhere, I never would have fought my way through the brush, but I did, and I almost missed the ruins anyway. The logs sticking out of the sheer cliff (and the small dark openings) were my only clue. I got the impression these people did not want to be found...

As we drew closer, more walls appeared, molded seamlessly into the vertical cliff. The walls hid a series of small alcoves into which rooms had been constructed. Instead of a single room perched on a block of rock, this was a small pueblo complex with at least seven or eight rooms. The upper log sticking out of the cliff was probably the brace for a ladder that accessed the rooms even higher up the cliff.

We shimmied up the log to access the pueblo, and were surprised by how much space was present behind the outer wall.

The walls and doorways were remarkably well preserved. The lintels over the doors were still encased in the adobe, and in many places, the fingerprints of the builders were preserved.

 The logs forming the ceilings were unchanged, except for generations of cooking fires.

 Roof intact, plaster coverings intact, wood unburnt...this was one of the best-preserved pueblos I've ever seen.

The dwelling is referred to as the Wall Ruin, and it is 3.7 miles up the canyon. You may notice I'm not making a big issue about where the dwellings are located, but there are enough clues here to figure it out on the internets with a bit of searching. I want this place to be here 700 years from now, and even though these sites are legally protected, any idiot can destroy centuries of culture in a matter of minutes. I've even heard of morons who used wood beams from 700 years ago...as firewood.

I like to think that spirits of the ancestors still inhabit these places, and I like to think that they will make life miserable for those who abuse and vandalize their realm.

The next portion of our journey would take us into a different landscape, one that was largely ignored by the Ancestral Pueblo people, a place where it was too dry to grow crops and subsist off the land. We were headed into the Canyonlands.

Meanwhile, in the present day, I will be on the road for a few days, taking our students on a field studies excursion into the eastern Sierra Nevada and Owens Valley. See ya'll in a few days!

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: The fusion of geology and architecture, part 1 (and a gratuitous lizard photo).

A Collared Lizard at Castle Rock Pueblo

OK, the lizard was an attention getting device...what I really want to talk about is the stunning beauty that resulted when the Ancestral Pueblo people built their homes in total harmony with the landscape they inhabited. Two places really stand out in my experiences, Hovenweep National Monument on the Utah-Colorado border, and a canyon on Cedar Mesa a bit further west in Utah.

In so many places where humans live, their houses and other buildings are imposed on the landscape regardless of appearance or topography. If the land doesn't conform to the builder's desire, the land gets changed, bulldozed, straightened and groomed. When I first arrived at Hovenweep National Monument and gazed at the structures of the Ancestral Puebloan people, I was struck by how the buildings conformed to the rock.

There is little to be seen of the full extent of the habitations that must have existed here, as many of them remain unexcavated and hidden by sagebrush and debris. Built the most unique structures line the rim of the canyon below the visitor center. It feels like the dwellings and towers grew out of the rock itself. Many of the structures were constructed on top of huge fallen boulders and the buildings follow the contours of the rock.

It is sometimes hard to discern the function of some of the buildings, with the strange placement of doorways and windows. Towers would seem to be used for observation posts, but some of the towers were constructed in the canyon where nothing in particular could be viewed.

Looking across the canyon the twin tower command one's attention, but upon closer inspection, one realizes there is another dwelling inside the big boulder on the right.

There are several rooms in the boulder, and the debris on the top of the boulder suggests there was once a structure on top. I don't really want to be flippant, but I look at these dwellings and I almost imagine Dr. Suess characters living here. Whatever the reasons were for the construction of these wonderful buildings, I have to appreciate the creativity that they represent.

In the next post, I will be getting into the Wayback Machine (does anyone recall that allusion?). It's been a decade or so since I took a walk through a magical canyon on the western edge of the "fertile crescent" of the Ancestral Pueblo people on Cedar Mesa, and discovered a near total fusion of human habitation and rock. It wasn't part of our trip last summer, but it seems to fit the theme of the moment.

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: What will the evidence be of your passage?

Paleoindian artifacts at the Anasazi Heritage Center, dating to 7,000-9,500 years BC

Our journey throught the Abandoned Lands continued. We were on a combined geology/archaeology field studies trip last June, and for much of middle part of the trip we were following in reverse the journey of the Pueblo People to their present-day homes along the Rio Grande River. We explored Bandelier, Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, and were now making our way through the "fertile crescent" of the Ancestral Puebloans that extended from Mesa Verde to Cedar Mesa in Utah.

Artifacts from the Archaic Period, 7,000 BC -200 AD

As a rank amateur in archaeology, I had always somehow assumed that the cliff dwellings in places like Mesa Verde had always been the home of the Ancestral Puebloans for hundreds of years. As we have seen in the last few posts of this series, the famous cliff dwellings were home to the people for only a few generations before they abandoned the region for the Hopi mesas or the Rio Grande. For more than a thousand years, the people lived in pithouses and small pueblos spread widely across the Colorado Plateau. From what we can tell today, fear of invasion or warfare was not part of their story until the very end, the last few generations.

Basketmaker II artifacts, from about 0-500 AD

I always had a tendency to think of the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people in terms of their buildings, their pottery and their arrowheads. In my own journeys that was nearly all I ever saw of their lives, aside from the petroglyphs and pictographs I've discovered here and there. The meticulous work of the archaeologists goes a long way towards filling out the daily lives of the people who lived on this land for so very long.

Basketmaker III artifacts from about 500-700 AD

The Dolores Rivers carves a deep canyon just north of Cortez, Colorado, and was an ideal site for a reservoir to be built in this arid landscape. The resulting lake would have covered and destroyed hundreds of sites, so a rapid excavation of as many sites as possible was undertaken, and the three million artifacts formed the basis for the collection at the Anasazi Heritage Center in Dolores, Colorado, an excellent museum and research center run by the Bureau of Land Management. The Center also serves as the headquarters for the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

Pueblo I artifacts, from about 700-900 AD

We were on a field trip, but artifacts like these are rarely seen in the field. This was as close as we could get to "feeling" the lives of these people, of getting close to what daily existence was like. So today is a series of pictures that are snapshots of a particular period in the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people. It is amazing to me how well some of these artifacts survived (especially considering the trepidations of pothunters and other vandals).

Pueblo II artifacts from about 900-1100 AD

I always dream of finding things like this while on an expedition in the wilds of the Plateau country. Who doesn't want to be the next Indiana Jones? But as the years have passed, I have come to realize the value of allowing excavations to be done by those who have the training to interpret what they are seeing, and the value of seeing the objects in context. The issues are the same as those involved with paleontology and the loss of information when vandals dig up dinosaur bones or precious fossils like those of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia.

Pueblo III artifacts, from about 1,100-1,300 AD. I love the mug...

Will our artifacts and trash middens be as interesting in a thousand years, or will anyone be looking? What will people think of iPods if they have no way of turning them on? The ongoing joke among anthropology folks is that anything whose role is unclear must be interpreted as a ceremonial object. And in the case of an iPod, they may be right...

In our next post we explore the heart of the "fertile crescent" of the Ancestral Pueblo people at Canyon of the Ancients and Hovenweep National Monuments.

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: In death and the end of all things, there is beauty?

Spruce Tree House

Living in harmony with nature...

One sometimes hears such statements about some pastoral time when humans lived off the land, living in peace with their neighbors, and as such there was this Eden-like quality to existence. A moment's thought will probably lead one to realize that such situations in the human sojourn on this planet have been exceedingly rare. 

At the most cynical level, living in harmony with nature means that a society or culture is living within the strict constraints of resources, imposed by marginal agricultural lands or limited water sources. If the population grows too much, starvation ensues, and harmony is restored only when part of the population dies off. Very Malthusian....

We were continuing with our journey through the Abandoned Lands, the world of the Colorado Plateau. In the last post, we were taking stock of the landscape that surrounds the famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park.

Square Tower House

In a sense, the Ancestral Pueblo people did live a rather harmonious existence at Mesa Verde. The available evidence suggests that people lived on the flat divides of the mesa for more than 600 years with little violence or warfare. How many parts of the world can claim such a record?

That isn't to say that life was in any way easy. In some ways life was brutal and short; the average lifespan was less than thirty years, and elders who reached their fifties were rare. Many burials show evidence of disease, and the gritty corn meal wore teeth away at a horrific rate. Women often died in childbirth.

Cliff Palace

And then there are the incredible stone cities that lie in the alcoves of Cliff House Sandstone that made Mesa Verde so famous. They are so striking in their architectural grace that one can look at them and sense that the Ancestral Puebloans had reached the pinnacle of their technological development when they built these dwellings. The truth is, as always, complicated.

Cliff Palace

They didn't live in these cities for very long...

Most of them were constructed at the beginning of the 1200s and they were mostly abandoned before 1300. For more than 600 years, the Ancestral Puebloans were content to live in small villages and family pithouses on the mesa tops. The alcoves containing the stone cities were cold and drafty in winter, they were practically inaccessible, and often far from water sources (a few alcoves had springs that emerged in the rear). For all their architectural grandeur, they were not comfortable places to live.

Cliff Palace

One could just as easily ask why Europeans built unassailable castles. They didn't want to be assailed. The stone cities of Mesa Verde, plain and simple, were fortresses. Despite their beauty, the cliff dwellings were the harbingers of the end of human occupation of Mesa Verde, an omen that foretold the abandonment of a place that a people called home for 600 mostly peaceful years.

Spruce Tree House

What went wrong? Anthropologists are not in complete agreement. But something they do agree on is that the archaeological record shows more evidence of violence and warfare at this time than in any comparable period in Ancestral Puebloan history. Some of the dwellings contained butchered bodies that were never given burials. The pathology was obvious: their skulls were bashed in and the structures purposely burned. I wrote of the tragedy of one of these villages, Castle Rock Pueblo, which can be found west of Mesa Verde. The villagers came to a sudden violent end about 1280, and the pueblo was never again occupied.

Geotripper contemplates Spruce Tree House

What events transpired that led a culture to live in fear for upwards of a century? What precipitated their final abandonment of the entire region? There have been stories of invaders from the north, but archaeological evidence for outside intervention is sparse at best. Was the violence fratricidal? There were intense multi-decade droughts that could have brought about crop failures and soil loss from erosion. Food stores may have run short. Faced with starvation, what would you do?

There is mystery about the reasons for the disappearance of the Ancestral Pueblo people, but there is no mystery about where they ended up. We have been exploring the lands of their descendants on this blog journey, at the pueblos along the Rio Grande River, and at the Hopi mesas. They have weathered many turbulent events and upheavals, but have persisted in this hard landscape when many others gave up.

As I pointed out in the previous post, this was a most extraordinary day: I left my camera in camp. All of these wonderful photographs are courtesy of my own Mrs. Geotripper.

Accretionary Wedge #36: How does life affect geology? Surviving on the Colorado Plateau

There was a day this home was abandoned. There was a day that something happened, a decision was made. Were they under attack? Did people die? Or was it a moment that a family knew the crops had failed, and there would be no food that winter? Or no more water in the nearby streambed? Were they called away to another place by a chief, or a shaman? Lots of questions, questions that are hard to answer. But abandoned it was, along with hundreds or thousands of similar homes in the region. Abandoned for hundreds of years before others came into the region.

Tourists seek out these former homes, and many of them remark on the permanence of these structures, still standing after 800 years. I look at them and I think of the permanence of stone, maybe, but also the transitory existence of people and populations. Before the decision to leave, generations of people had lived in these structures, and throughout their lives they never thought of being anywhere else. They didn't plan on enduring whatever catastrophe or threat that led to the decision to leave. But leave they did. There are lots of hypotheses, but I feel pretty strongly that they finally exceeded the capacity of the land to support human populations. That led to whatever else happened, I suspect.

Accretionary Wedge #46, hosted this month by Knowledge Flocs asks the question: How has life or civilization been affected by geology or how has geology been affected by life? I pondered this question essentially for the whole month before sitting down tonight and writing this. I was out there on the Colorado Plateau a few weeks back, and I almost mindlessly snapped a picture that I didn't give a second thought to. It was part of the view from the Wahweap Overlook at Lake Powell on the border between Arizona and Utah, and I was snapping a series of shots to get sort of a panoramic record of the view.

Tonight it caught my eye. A coal-burning power plant on the shores of an artificial desert lake. What is the carrying capacity of this land? There are thousands of people living in the immediate vicinity, but there are lines of copper wire leading out like a web to literally millions of homes in the wider region, especially places like Phoenix or Las Vegas. Looking at the coal-burning powerplant is to realize that the present-day population is depending on sunlight that fell on plants 70 million years ago to survive. They are depending on water that used to exist only in a deep inaccessible canyon. And to propel their vehicles they import the remains of plankton and one-celled organisms that lived by trillions upon trillions 200 million years ago in oceans and seas that don't even exist on Planet Earth anymore. Their food in large part is grown in other states or other continents.

And we take for granted that we will be living here permanently. We barely ever give thought to the intricate web of connections and imported energy that keeps this civilization alive. What happens when a piece of the web breaks?

I ask in particular because of that white strip along the shoreline of Lake Powell. It's the bathtub ring of the reservoir. It doesn't look like much from my lofty perch, but that is a terrifying lake level if you are one of the watermasters responsible for providing an allotment of water needed to keep things going downstream. The Colorado is the most important source of water in this arid land except for groundwater, which is pretty much non-renewable and is being used up in many areas. The region has been suffering through a decade-long drought, and global warming is leading to changes that may intensify the droughts for the conceivable future.

There are limits.That is the effect of geology on human life in this region. There is only so much water, and there is only so much coal. And populations and societies are not stable. Some will last longer than others, but the changes will come. Will we know when the limits have been reached and act? Or will we be caught off guard, and realize we need to move someplace else? And where will we go?

I'm appalled when I hear politicians say that the most important questions facing our generation have to do with the marriage of the gays and how important it is to de-fund Planned Parenthood.