The Green Table

The number of French speaking tourists in the desert southwest was astonishing. I think I heard more French than English in our stay at the Kayenta inn.

Kayenta is in the heart of Navajo country, and the scenery is straight out of roadrunner, with mesas, standing columns of rock, and red dirt and stone everywhere.

So this is the third day of rain in the desert. I've come to conclude that it's not that we've had good luck with the weather, but opposite luck. Sunny in the rainforest of Glacier. Sunny and cool on a Chicago summer day. Sunny and warm on a San Francisco summer day. And of course rainy in the southwest. We drove from the inn to four corners, where we were all able to stand in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona at one time. There's a plaque at the spot where the four corners join, and that got me wondering how precisely they could place that plaque, and then how much the ground is moving due to plate tectonics. Do they have to move the plaque by millimeters a year? Then, how are the boundaries of the states determined? Are we all dependent on the location of Greenwich, England?

We made the drive to Mesa Verde, in southwest Colorado, and took a tour of Balcony House, one of many dwellings discovered in the cliffs surrounding the mesas here. The mesas are there because there's a cap of hard rock over layers of sandstone, which allows erosion to act to create the mesas. It turns out that some meters down in the mesas there a layer of shale which stops water intrusion, which in turn causes little springs to appear in the edge of the mesas. These springs gradually erode these alcoves out, and the Pueblan people, starting at about 500AD, settled down out of their hunter/gatherer lifestyle to a domesticated existence of farming the mesa tops and hunting the surrounding areas, while living in a child's dreamhouse, where climbing opportunites abound. Apparently they eventually hunted out all the game, and were reduced to eating corn and hunting chipmunks. Interestingly, they only lived to about thirty years old because the corn was ground with sandstone, which left sand in the meal and ground down their teeth to tiny nubs in that span.

We're staying the night in Mesa Verde on their campground, looking at beautiful stars.