but why did the Anasazi only build ruins?

[ilanarama]

Back from a weekend trip to Road Canyon, which is in the Cedar Mesa area of Utah. (I love living so close to such cool stuff! It's only about 3.5 hours away.) We had a great time camping in our Sportsmobile, hanging out, reading, drinking beer, and hiking down into the canyon and looking for ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings. (We found some nice ones!)

Only problem was that I got bitten to death by gnats, which we weren't expecting to have hatched out quite yet - it seems to be an early summer all over the southwest, what with our snowpack level and river levels about what we normally get in mid-June. Alas. The bites itch like a %$#@!, too.

Ten photos here on my Flickr page.

Comments

[blnchflr]

Gahh, it looks so dry, I feel I should be gasping for air - was it also so dry when people lived there?

Gnats bite.

[ilanarama]

It is very dry, yes! But when people lived here it was much less arid; the seasonal stream in the bottom flowed year-round, and we saw evidence of a spring in the back of one of the dwellings that is no longer flowing but must have been reasonably big.