The BLM maintains a trail at the base of Little Black Mountain, a 500-ft mesa with very nice petroglyphs all around its base. The kids had a blast running around, climbing, scrambling, and getting dirty. The wind picked up while we were there and dried us out like dehydrated apricots.
Part of the fun with petroglyphs is trying to figure out what they mean. Are they merely graffitti, carved by bored teenagers, or do they have deep meanings? Grampa is in the Erich Von Daniken camp on this topic. He showed us all a complex drawing that clearly illustrated a De Havilland Beaver (or Otter - we weren't quite sure) on floats. I'm in the bored teen camp on this one.
Next, we went on to find "The Glitter Hole." It's a gypsum mine completely in the middle of nowhere. There's a pure gypsum deposit just below the surface. By pure, I mean that the deposit is essentially a single giant (50+ feet in diameter) crystal of clear and shiny gypsum. The tailing are nothing but orange-sized clear crystals. The kids all hacked at the wall of the mine for an hour, trying to chop out the biggest piece of crystal they could. GP ended up with a hadfull of blisters from the rock hammer.
No comments:
Post a Comment