Tag Archives: National park/monument

Florrisant Fossil Beds – fossils and petrified wood buried in volcanic mudflows

The Florrisant Fossil Bed National Monument isn’t very well known, but it is very interesting.

Thirty-four million years ago this part of Colorado was a lake with a warm, temperate climate. There were many types of insects, birds, fish and mammals. This was also the home to a forest of giant redwoods, some estimated to be 500-750 years old and 250+ feet high.

But, there was a nearby volcano that erupted and spewed out ash and mud flow that buried the lake and 15 feet of the surrounding forest. The lake had a surface layer of a type of algae that, combined with the ash/mud flow, served to cement the insects, mammals, plants, birds etc. and eventually produced a huge assortment of fossils in the area. The stumps of the redwoods became petrified over time.

In the late 1800 settlers came into the area and started to find the fossils and stumps. Some of the settlers collected and preserved a wide array of fossils and turned them over to scientists who came out to see the area. But, other settlers opened their land to tourists who dug up lots of fossils and broke apart many of the stumps for souveniors.

In the 1930s area residents started petitioning the government to protect the area. But, it wasn’t until 1969 that the area became a national monument and the remaining fossils and stumps were protected.

Now the area is a grassy meadow and forested land with many trails that visitors can walk around the view the remaining petrified redwood stumps and a museum that displays many fossils and a history of the area.

Here are some pictures we took:

Mesa Verde – the most popular ancient cliff dwelling sites

Probably the most famous of the ancient Puebloan sites is Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado. There are over 1,000 archeological sites on the Mesa Verde plateaus, about 600 of them are cliff houses. Most are unexcavated and not accessible to visitors, and most that are accessible are only through a guided tour. We visited one cliff dwelling that didn’t require a guided tour although there was a ranger at the site, and Jeff visited two others with a guided tour. Based on the steep steps and ladders (my hip has been bothering me when climbing up) and on the very small tunnels visitors have to crawl through I decided to stay home.

Cliff Palace is the ‘crown jewel’ of all the sites at Mesa Verde. It really is a palace! The site was excavated to recover artifacts, and the rubble removed and many walls rebuilt so that visitors can see how the ancient puebloans lived here. The Balcony House is also very large and fabulous.

We also walked around some of the pueblo style structures.

We had a great time visiting Mesa Verde – here are some pictures:

Black Canyon of Gunnison – very steep and beautiful

We visited the Black Canyon of the Gunnison located near Montrose, CO. It’s an immense canyon that was cut through hard metamorphic rock over millions of years producing very vertical canyon walls. The canyon is located on a mesa, so you have to drive up to get to the top of the canyon and see down into it.

It’s not as large as the Grand Canyon but is very impressive! There are several overlooks on the south rim where we visited and also on the north rim. It can be climbed by experienced rock climbers but of course we didn’t do that! There is no evidence that ancient natives lived in the canyon itself because of the type of rock – very hard metamorphic rock with shafts of lighter colored rock that was molten and squeezed up into cracks in the older metamorphic rock (not lava, but similar to it). As the river started running across the mesa and cutting into it, the hard rock caused the river to stay on it’s course cutting deeper and deeper rather than meandering and widening the canyon.

There is a narrow, very steep road (in many areas it’s got a 16% incline!) that goes to the dam built at the head of the canyon. It was built not to create a large lake but to divert water to the nearby valleys for irrigation. It has reduced the river somewhat but not too much.

It was very interesting to see this canyon cut into such hard rock!

Here are some pictures:

Hovenweep – ancient puebloan structures right on edge of a canyon

There are so many ancient puebloan sites in the southwest Colorado area and we could only visit a few of them. One of the most interesting is Hovenweep which is actually just across the border in Utah. We visited some structures built right along the edges of a canyon which would seem a very strange place to want to live when there is so much flat land around the canyon. One theory of why they built right on the edges of the canyon is to preserve the flat land for farming.

Another unusual feature of many of the structures along the canyon is that they are small but built very tall, resembling towers. Some are round and some are square.

Here are some pictures:

Canyons of the Ancients

Also in the southwest part of Colorado is a national park called “Canyons of the Ancients”. It’s a large and spread out park containing several areas where ancient Puebloans built structures and lived. Much of the area is only accessible by 4-wheel drive, but we visited one spot called Lowry Pueblo where there is a great house with over 100 rooms and it’s estimated that several hundred people lived there at one time. Like most of the other ancient puebloan sites, it was occupied in the 1100-1200s and was abandoned in the late 1200s. It was previously thought that the abandonment of all the ancient puebloan sites in such a short timeframe had extra-terrestrial roots (ET came and took them) or that there were wars among the native tribes, it is now thought that they simply felt it was time to move along to a new area. There could have been a drought and the resources may have been used up. Modern natives who can trace their ancestry, through oral history, to these sites feel that’s what happened – they decided to move along. Modern natives still visit many of these sites to speak to their ancestors and hold ceremonies.

At Lowry Pueblo some of the walls were reconstructed and some were dug out partially. The interior section of the great house where all the rooms are connected and at least 2 stories high, is protected by a modern roof against further wind and rain erosion. The pueblo is built on a small hill with great 360 degree views!

Here are some pictures we took:

Chimney Rock – natural rock formation plus ancient Puebloan site

While in southwest Colorado we wanted to visit Chimney Rock, which is a very interesting natural rock formation. What made it even more interesting is that the ancient puebloans built structures near the rock formations, high on the top of the very steep mountain.

There are actually 2 rocks, chimney rock and companion rock. The ancient puebloans built a great house and kiva, like so many other of their structures, with the north wall aligning along the sunrise at summer solstice. Here at Chimney Rock there’s an added feature that if you look along the northern wall at summer solstice the sun rises not only along the northern wall, but also between the two rock formations. It is thought that this is why they built in such an unlikely place with no water and such a steep climb up to the structures. There are other places where ancient puebloans built structures in what would seem difficult spots but apparently had significance to them. There are smaller structures about halfway up the mountain and it’s thought that most of the people in this area lived there, with the great house and kiva at the summit reserved for the upper class – those who knew how to read the sun, moon and stars and direct the timing of various activities such as planting, hunts, etc.

Here are some pictures we took:

The Great Sand Dunes in Colorado

Our first stop in Colorado is Alamosa, the nearest town to the Great Sand Dunes. The area is in a huge, almost totally flat valley. When you look closer you’ll see that what seems flat is really low dunes, held in place by the vegatation. The valley is ringed by the San Luis Mountains on the west and the Rockies on the east. The prevailing winds come from the west blowing sand and grit from the San Luis mountains across the valley floor, but is then diverted north and back to the west by the tall mountains. Any sand and grit that blows all the way across the valley is deposited in one area by the winds, forming the dunes. The dunes are held in this one small area of the valley by these winds.

It is estimated that the dunes are over 300 feet deep (below what we see as the surface, and the tallest dune rises over 750 feet high. It is also estimated that the dunes are over 440,000 years old.

Two rivers run down from the peaks of the eastern mountains and help form the boundary of the dunes. The one on the south is shallow and wide, and can be crossed by visitors to the sand dunes. This time of year the deepest part was about 2 inches, barely covering the toes. But the sand is deep and smooth.

We crossed the stream and walked around on the dunes. We didn’t hike up any – we are at over 8,000 feet and walking in sand is hard enough, but add a 40 degree upslope and it’s almost impossible!

Here are some pictures we took:

Capulin Volcano

We drove from Santa Fe to the very northeast section of N.M. to see another volcano. As we drove into the Capulin area it started turning very green…so different from the rest of New Mexico! We learned that it’s the wettest year in this area in a long time.

The weather was interesting…every day it was clear with blue skies and warmed up fast, hitting the 80s by noon. But, at between 3-3:30 every afternoon the sky would cloud up and it would rain. It would RAIN! Huge raindrops, some hail, lots of thunder and lightning! After a couple of hours of that it would clear up and you could see stars at night.

Capulin volcano is a fairly recent cinder cone – about 65,000 years old. The region is all volcanic, with activity from 1-3 million years ago that shaped mesas and ridges to recent activity in the area about 30,000 years ago.

A cinder cone is formed when ash and gasses along with chunks of lava spout out of a crack in the earth’s crust. Over time the ash and gasses and chunks build up the land from being flat to being a round cone. Usually it’s concave in the center and often it’s lower on one side and higher on the other because the prevailing winds will push the ash and gasses as they spurt out. Capulin volcano is a very prime example of this type of volcano.

A unique feature of this volcano is that you can drive to the low side of the rim and hike up and around the whole rim! We did that hike – at 8,000 feet and very steep sections of about 45 degrees, we took it slowly but it was well worth it!

The 360 degree views from the rim area are fabulous and show how the whole area is volcanic.

We saw some deer that live in the cinder cone (they leave often to get water etc. but are in the cone almost every day); and we saw lots of antelope as we drove through the area. We were driving down a narrow road from a mesa into a valley and got stopped by a cattledrive; the cowboys (and cowgirl) were expert at getting the cattle into one lane so we could pass.

Overall, a lovely part of this state.

Here are some pictures we took:

Aztec Ruins aren’t really Aztec – it’s a Pueblo Great House

While in Farmington we visited the Aztec Ruins. They are NOT really Aztec; when settlers discovered the site in the late 1800s they thought it was an Aztec site and named it. The nearby town is also called Aztec so the name stuck. This is another example of another ancient Puebloan great house, similar to the Chaco Canyon great houses.

This great house was extensively excavated and the large kiva reconstructed in the 1920s-1930s by Lewis Morgan, who grew up in the area and became an archeologist. He took great care to not disturb items found inside the structures and there are many examples of pottery, weaving, etc. that were found. He reconstructed the kiva using modern technology but keeping it as close to the original as he could, including the colors based on remnants that he found. Using modern technology (for the 1920s) it took over 7 months to build the kiva.

One item unique to this site is that the outside walls had bands of dark green stones where the rest of the stones are light gray. It is not known why this was done.

Here are some pictures we took at the site:

Chaco Canyon – center of the ancient Puebloan culture

Chaco Canyon is a complex of several great houses build and used by the Puebloan people between about 850-1150A.D. The great houses were really cities – Pueblo Bonito is the largest and has 600 rooms built in 4 stories. Many were storage rooms and public rooms. Peublo Bonito housed perhaps 2,000 people but the population swelled during feast and ceremonial times when people would come from the other great houses and even from further away, swelling the population to perhaps 6,000 people.

Several of the rooms are round and built down in the ground on the lowest level in large courtyards. They are kivas and they were used for several different ceremonial purposes.

The Puebloan people who are descendents of the people who lived in the great houses have many stories about how their ancestors lived. They believe that the great houses were abandoned at about 1150A.D. simply because the people were nomadic and left it was time to move on. The food supplies may have become scarce after so long in one place, or there may have been a drought. It’s unknown.

All of the great houses were heavily looted in the late 1800s by settlers, many of whom took away wagons of the squared stones to use in their own houses. A surveyor in the 1880s took pictures of the Pueblo Bonito showing it as much larger and more complete at that time. Sand and dirt filled in a lot of it and the National Geographic Society had a project to remove much of the dirt and uncover a lot of Pueblo Bonito so that visitors can see a lot of the ruins. Several other great houses are still mostly under heavy layers of sand and dirt.

The several great houses in the area were connected by roads that were very straight…when the road came to a cliff a stairway was built right into the cliff to preserve the straightness of the road. There’s a nearby very tall and steep butte, Fajada Butte, that has carvings at the top showing the progression of the moon and stars. So it’s known that the Puebloan people charted and studied the night sky.

Here are pictures that we took at Chaco Canyon: