|
|
|
New Mexico's Mysterious Stone Towers,
Part VI, continued...
(Travel/Explore #7: February 22, 2003)
My First Tower
 It was near the south end of the path, to the west, a low wall on a clay dome about ten feet tall. The entire mound was surrounded by squared stone rubble. A lot of it had been stabilized, too. On top of the mound I could look over the wall down into the interior. No doubt about this one–it was a tower. A lot matched Hibben’s description: it was nicely made of squared sandstone blocks.  Inside it was about ten feet deep with a floor grown calf-deep with grass and weeds. It probably would be deeper if the interior rubble were cleared out. This time there was enough fallen rubble outside the structure to have raised the walls another five to eight feet. There was one odd thing, though. The inside was only about six feet in diameter, maybe eight. Certainly no more than four occupants could stand inside, and they could not possibly defend themselves. Only an idiot would climb down in here for protection. Since I’m not an idiot, I didn’t go down into the tower either. It was just deep enough to be hard to climb out of, and I’d certainly damage the walls trying. The interior was circular, the outside square. It was a tower, but only a little like those Hibben described in his article. What else was on the ridge? A few hundred feet farther south the trail ended in a two-room ruin perched exactly on the bluff edge of the ridge end. From here I could see the road below through the pine trees. Odd that I hadn’t been able to see this wall from the road.  An apartment or a tower?
| ||
Mostly rubble was left
|
This may have been a tower, too, but it seemed more like a dwelling. It was a long rectangle. It wasn’t surrounded by stone rubble, and the walls were quite thin. SC had collected the fallen rubble in a pile at the west end of the ruin. Then it began to dawn on me what must have happened. All these nicely lined paths had been surfaced and bordered with rubble collected from the crumbling pit houses and towers on the ridge! No wonder it was impossible to distinguish pit houses from towers. This pile of stones at the end of the ridge was all that was left. I bent over to take a closer look at the stones in the pile. They were all sandstone* fragments of various sizes. But there, in the pile, was something I felt was significant, the remains of the molded clay stuffing that had been tamped in place to hold the roof poles in the wall. These moldings still held particles of bark from their poles (cut and placed two hundred years before Columbus landed on these shores?) There were even fingerprints of the potters who’d packed the mud in place. Even with SC’s desecration of the site I felt an immediate link with those past men who’d lived, and maybe died, here on Ridge Y.
|
*As I mentioned in a previous episode, the stone in this area is not really sandstone, a sedimentary rock deposited in water. This stone is compacted volcanic ash from the eruption of the Jemez volcano a long time ago. It looks like sandstone and feels somewhat like it, but its grains are tiny flat flakes, not round grains.
|
I stayed at the south end of the trail about an hour making pictures, rummaging around, and enjoying the cool breeze that skimmed over the ridge from the east. I’d finally found towers–not the dramatic ones Hibben described, and not on my own, the way I’d wanted to find them; but here they were. Why didn’t they match what I expected? I still had questions.
 There was still standing water
In my examination I noticed a few things that seemed unusual. All the pits/towers contained either open water or soft mud. There had been a recent rain, but in this heat, at this altitude, I was surprised that the water hadn’t evaporated. Perhaps the polyethylene stabilization really was a necessary thing to prevent total collapse of what pitiful structures remained. I had seen many trail washouts in the Yabis area. Under even the small force of light rain the clay turned liquid and ran away in little streams that quickly became bigger gutters. Stone walls filled with soil and rubble could easily dissolve into thin, unstable shells. That must have happened here. |
||
Beneath the stone...
|
I also noticed that the rubble contained a few rounded stones different from the cut ones from the wall. I’d found these stones frequently in the Yabis area, and a few had turned out to be geodes, hollow sandstone balls with agate or crystalline cores. As children, we’d considered them real prizes. The one I picked up on Ridge Y was not a sphere, but oblong, like a tiny football. I wondered what was inside and rubbed absent-mindedly at the narrow end. A portion of the stone shell flaked away to expose a fossil mussel shell. Perhaps it had rolled over and over in muddy sediment until it was sealed away in its sandstone coat. I’d seen these stones several times before in the area but never thought much about them. Was Ridge Y also a good fossil hunting ground?
It was a warm, bright day, but a cool breeze was blowing gently from down in the valley. Since I was a boy, one of my great pleasures has been to sit quietly outdoors and enjoy the surroundings. I'd been so interested in finding the towers I'd not really stopped to smell the roses. I'd do it now! |
...inside the shell
|
For lunch I opened a pack of peanut butter crackers and a small carton of fruit drink. I’d also brought a few dried, smoked herrings in a zip-lock bag. I wasn't in a hurry now, so I leaned against the trunk of a piñon tree right at the edge of the bluff (a tree that still had its bark) and just powered down. I alternately munched at the snacks, composed a letter to my office mates back home, and dozed.
 A peaceful spot overlooking the Yabis valley
I enjoyed the spot almost an hour, being a part of this beautiful terrain. My seat overlooked the road along the eastern side of the ridge and the wide valley farther east. During the whole time I sat there no cars passed on the road below. | ||
| Why Does It Always Have to Be Bears? |
Bears have figured prominently in my thoughts and in occasional troubled dreams since I was very young. In all my trips out here I'd never seen bear prints, spoor, or any bear, except in a tiny zoo near Santa Fe. The bears reported to be in this area were few and small, about the size of large dogs. But the thought of bears was always with me. The Discovery Channel, with its frequent, graphic stories about bear maulings and close calls had done nothing to calm or reassure me.
When I hiked I walked quietly over new terrain. I felt a constant pressure behind my eyes and my head swam slightly. My vision actually narrowed slightly in unfamiliar terrain, almost as in a mild state of shock. Part of this was surely because I was alone; but part was fear of unseen bears. I believe it borders on a real phobia. Would I always fear bears? A ranger brochure I had seen in the Coyote station advised anyone who met a bear to fight it aggressively. It was OK to shoot and kill a bear, the poster said. As I sat there I began to think that this was as good a time as any to encounter my fears. The plastic bag I had used to carry the herring was very fragrant. If there were bears in the area, the fishy aroma, carried on the breeze, should certainly catch their attention. I turned the bag inside-out and hung it on a low tree branch. Bait! But for whom?
|
Previous Page Top of Page Next Page
|
