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The Earliest Arrivals - Archaeologist R.S. "Scotty" MacNeish called it "Pendejo Cave". Located in south central New Mexico in the desert basin between the Sacramento and Guadalupe Mountain ranges to the east, and the Organ Mountain range to the west, Pendejo (Spanish vernacular for "coward" or "jerk") Cave doesn't look like much.
After a visit to the cave with MacNeish in the early 1990's, my wife, Martha, and I could scarcely imagine why he would have chosen such a place for excavation. MacNeish (killed at 82 years of age in a car crash in Belize on January 17, 2001) stood at the pinnacle of his profession, a legend in American archaeology. "Wait until we get back to the lab and you see what we've found," Scotty said. More...
Dinosaur Bone Collections - We walk carefully through the graveyard. Bones, old bones, lie scattered on the ground -- bones of creatures who roamed the earth 140 million years ago. We're searching the barren soil for fragments that wash down the narrow gully after thunderstorms. A thick strata of crumbling clay on the hillside sheds bones like a fractured casket. Colorful pieces of petrified wood and agates mix with the bones and pebbles of worn sandstone and mudstone.
Like gold-crazed miners who just discovered a mother lode of nuggets, we can't take our eyes off the ground. "Look over here," says Kathy. We gather around a bone protruding from the soft soil. "It's a femur, probably an Apatosaur, a large plant-eating dinosaur." She kneels and carefully scoops away dirt with her hand. The leg bone dates from a time when the surrounding desert was a humid flood plain and the largest mammals were mouse-sized critters. More...
Family Fun Afloat - Mark had assured us, "If you can drive a car, you can drive a houseboat." However we had been houseboating before and knew it isn't exactly the same. Our car is not 70 feet in length nor is it 22 feet high therefore it is not affected by the wind.
We headed north on the river toward Hoover Dam. The sun gave a brilliant color to the rocky landscape which sliced between the robin's egg blue of the desert sky and the blue black of the water. At Owl Point Cove we found the perfect mooring place. Read more...
Geronimo - The month of September in 1886, and the surrender of the infamous Chiricahua Apache Geronimo, marked the end of centuries of warfare between EuroAmericans and the desert Indians in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The final events -- those last spasms in the long clash between cultures -- played out like grand theater with larger-than-life characters. Ultimately, the story ended not in an epic and bloody battle, but with an operatic struggle between men of uncommon courage, valor, honor and humanism and those of common deceptiveness, cruelty, treachery and self-aggrandizement. The final act lasted for more than 16 months. Click here for more...
New Mexico's Bisti Badlands - The Bisti - the Navajo word for badlands - lay as cold and morose as a Matthew Brady photograph of a Civil War battle scene, with corpses littering the field. I wondered what forces of nature had created the Bisti. It was eerie, more a dreamscape than an actual landscape.
Chilled and a little spooked, I left the Bisti and headed north, through the grayness, up State Highway 371, across snow-patched high desert land of clumped grass to Farmington, a red wine, and warmth. The strange images of the Bisti remained in my mind's eye, and on a sun washed day some weeks later, I returned with my wife, Martha, for another look. I wanted to see whether I had been dreaming. More...
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DesertUSA is a comprehensive resource about the North American deserts and Southwest destinations. Learn about desert biomes while you discover how desert plants and animals learn to adapt to the harsh desert environment. Find travel information about national parks, state parks, BLM land, and Southwest cities and towns located in or near the desert regions of the United States. Access maps and information about the Sonoran Desert, Mojave Desert, Great Basin Desert, and Chihuahuan Desert.
