Adventures of a Boomer: Nine Mile Canyon - Price, Utah October 2013

What a neat trip this was. First we traveled to Price, Utah to see Nine Mile Canyon. Then on to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the four-day Paleamerican Odyssey Conference and lastly to Cortez, Colorado to assist in some excavating at Mitchell Springs Ruins (owned by archaeologist David Dove). We'll concentrateon Nine Mile Canyon! Someone asked us recently how the canyon got its name as the canyon is really over 40 miles of a 78-mile back-country byway. According to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) website one possible explanation was, explorer of Nine Mile Canyon in 1869, John Wesley Powell, had a cartographer who used a nine mile transect for mapping the canyon.

The petroglyphs at Nine Mile Canyon defy description...so many and so amazing. Including a few here to give you a feel for what we saw.

The Great Hunt

This was named The Great Hunt and was described as classic Fremont style rock art (circa AD 950 - 1200). It is a scene likely depicting herds of big horn sheep during mating season...usually the November, December timeframe. Also, it's the only time of year rams, ewes and lambs are all together in the same place. This is a very large panel, was very well-preserved and was jaw-dropping!

Here's a picture of my friend, Michael in front of the panel to give some perspective.

A few more petroglyphs:

Petroglyph at Nine Mile Canyon

Buffalo and other animals - Nine Mile Canyon

Petroglyph in color - Nine Mile Canyon

The last one is in color which was quite interesting. Not entirely sure it was from the same period or not.

The canyon is quite spectacular. There were a few graineries used to store corn still sitting above on the rock cliffs. Incredible they are still there...no doubt some stabilizing was recently done as it has been hundreds of years since they were used.

Grainery high on cliff

Closer view

Here I am on a hike above the canyon where some rock caves were...possibly Fremont Indian caves?

There are also working ranches in the canyon and so we encountered steer everywhere roaming free. The cowboys do round them up when it's time to go to market but apparently there are some steer not found as we came across two piles of bone and fur. We're guessing they froze in the canyon over the last winter. Either way they were going to perish. Here's a few pictures we found interesting:

Cows that perished

One large and one smaller

Some views of spectacular Nine Mile Canyon:

Paleoamerican Odyssey Conference - Santa Fe, New Mexico

On to Santa Fe - my favorite place! We got a great conference rate at the Sage Inn, a modest hotel about a mile or two from the main Plaza. The location was fine as we planned to drive to the beautiful new Santa Fe Community Conference center every day anyway near the corner of Marcy and Grant. It was truly an incedible experience being here...about 1400 people, more than half were non-professional or avocational archaeologists like us! Truly amazing. Four days solid, including evenings, of lectures on the
first Americans to venture here from Sibera via the Bering Land Bridge after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and/or Europe by boat before the LGM.. There is still much controversy about when the first Americans came here and from where. If you are interested in learning more about the lectures and topics, please visit this website:

http://paleoamericanodyssey.com/index.html

The exhibits and poster presentations in between lectures were incredible. The most amazing to us were the artifacts including projectile points, bifaces, blades, blade cores, overshot flakes, and other tools found in many parts of the country. Here are Clovis and pre-Clovis from our own pictures:

Extra Large Clovis vs Solutream Bifaces, note similarities. Difference is that Clovis points are fluted

Bifaces from Cheasapeake Bay - Pre-Clovis, possibly Solutream

Also, we are huge fans of the authors of Across Atlantic Ice - Bruce Bradley and Dennis Stanford whose hypothesis is the Solutrean ventured to North America from Europe about 22,000 years ago and were pre-Clovis paleoamerican explorers. What surprised us is that Bruce and Dennis are from and still go back to Southern Colorado near Four Corners where we have regularly excavated and are very good friends with archaeologists Dave Dove and Tom and Terri Hoff. Small world!

Dr. Bruce Bradley (left) and Dr. Dennis Stanford (right)

Amazing bold bifaces from various Clovis caches

My short post here doesn't do the conference justice so please do check out the website above where there are photos and abstracts from the numerous speakers. We purchased the big book of presentations and are still working our way through it. What a truly awesome experience this conference was!

After our stay in Santa Fe we made our way North to Cortez, Colorado to do some digging at Mitchell Springs. It was just the two of us, no field school. We offered to assist and were taken up on our offer to do some additional excavating which we happily did for two days.