New Pictures from Puye Cliff Dwellings and Petroglyph Monument

In June Patricia and I took a short field trip sponsored by SAR to see the newly re-opened cliff dwellings at Puye. These ruins are part of the Santa Clara Pueblo. They were closed for several years after the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 and just re-opened in May. The fire did not cause any direct damage to the site, but the Santa Clara Valley, where the site is located, had a lot of damage that took years to deal with.

Oral tradition has it that the inhabitants left around 1577 and moved closer to the Rio Grande--just about 10 miles away--and are now known as the Santa Clara Pueblo. As usual, SAR made sure we had good guides. Ours was from the Sana Clara Pueblo and she was very knowledgeable about Puye but she was also free to admit when what she told us was speculation or could not be documented.

Here are a couple of websites with information about Puye: "pueblo ruin where the rabbits assemble "and Wikipedia.

There were lots of petroglyphs there and seeing them reminded me that I had been meaning to visit the National Petroglyph Monument near Albuquerque. So, while Patricia was spending some time on Cape Cod, I drove down to take a look at the Petroglyph Monument. It is a very big place just on the western edge of Albuquerque. Enclosed in the Monument are areas where more than 20,000 petroglyphs can be seen and where 5 volcanoes lay dormant. I chose to take the Boca Negara trail to see some petroglyphs without doing a long hike. On Boca Negra you have to do some climbing to get to most of the petroglyphs but the climbing was worth it. I have seen some of the petroglyph shapes (symbols, pictographs?) in other locations in New Mexico but there were also ones I had not seen before, such as this one:

The pictures from June start

here.

Updates for May

May was a busy month for us.

We went on a School For Advanced Research (SAR) field trip to the Cerrillos Hills where we trekked out to some prehistoric turquoise mines. The Spanish, and later the Mexicans and Americans, mined these same areas for lead as well as turquoise.


After looking at the mine sites, we moved on to an archaeological site called the San Marcos Pueblo. At one time, this was one of the largest Native American "cities" in the Gallisteo Basin. It was mostly abandoned after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. (Interestingly, the Pueblo Revolt is sometimes discussed as if it happened yesterday, instead of nearly 330 years ago.) San Marcos is not a public site, but we were able to see it with the help of Bill Baxter, who is responsible for the site. There isn't much to see above ground since all the adobe has "melted" but the remains of the bases of some of the walls were visible. However, you could hardly take a step without finding a pottery sherd from the long occupation. There was a mission church there at one time, but it too has vanished. The pictures I posted from that trip can be found in the New Mexico 2009 album here.

Karl and Marlene stopped with us overnight and we took them out to the Pecos National Monument. We can always find new pictures to take there even though we visit it often. We really enjoyed their visit and we hope they come back soon.

I took a trip to West Linn to visit Tevya, Noah, and Kris. Noah has changed a lot since I last saw him in January. He amazed me with everything he can do and how curious he is. One of the good things about being a grandparent is that I don't have to live with that curiosity 24/7 as Tevya and Kris have to. I took quite a few pictures of Noah. You can find some of them starting at this point in the Noah Album. I posted a couple of videos that I took of Noah on the Noah movie page.


Towards the end of May, Patricia and I drove over to Las Vegas to see Kate, Jeff, and Abby. This was the first time we had seen Abby since she stopped being tied to the oxygen tank. Just like Noah, she has changed a lot since we last saw her in mid-March. We took lots of pictures and posted them in the Abby picture album starting on this page. At the end of this set of pictures, be sure to watch the short video of Abby happily blowing raspberries.

You can look at the pictures Becky often takes of Abby when she is watching her on Kate's workdays. That Snapfish album is here.