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August 29, 2004

Artifacts

Harrison, Giselle and I took a trip today with some friends to a place about 20 miles south of Winslow called Rock Art Ranch. (Amanda was recovering from a case of food poisoning, so she stayed home to recuperate in blissful silence.) So, this Ranch is a piece of private land owned by, get this, a rancher.

There's a rocky, steep walled canyon that slices through the low rolling hills. How many cattle have lost their lives cartwheeling over the winding precipices, I can't say. But apparently, the ancient aboriginals had a great time down there, because it is peppered on nearly every surface with incredible collections of petroglyphs. Mike, our resident petroglyph hunter, set up an appointment with the rancher to unlock the gates and take us out to the canyon.

I ended up shooting over 80 pictures of the etchings down there. Here are some of my favorites:

I'm not sure what this is supposed to be. Maybe phallic. But it looks like a lizard squeeze ketchup bottle to me.

I could be wrong, but this shot looks like a birth image. The little footprints along the lower right run down toward the creek.

I was really going off on a tangent with this one, and I think I was starting to embarrass Mike.

To me, this looks like a guy whose either been sliced open or is suffering from some really bad indigestion, and the doc is bringing over the convalescent bed. I showed it to Amanda when we got home and without me saying anything, she came up with nearly the same thing, but took it a mile further. She says the bisected man was hunting the elk and was subsequently gutted and they are laying him on the funeral bier to be burned on a pyre at sunset. The large, obviously well-fed man standing above elk managed to bag the buck after the 'incident', thus yielding the large rectangular loaf of meat seen to the left. And below fat man is another man running off with the strips of meat.

We are hacks.

Here we see Giselle checking out a crawdad that Brazus caught.

And here we find Harrison showing off what he calls his "sticky spiderman finger" climbing.

Alrighty. I haven't got the telescope set up to shoot long exposures through the eyepiece yet. But I was able to mount the camera on top of the tube and take long unmagnified exposures while the drive turned with the sky. I aimed for Andromeda, and got this:

The shot is loaded with noise. So to do it right, I'd probably have to take around 10 shots and average them together to smooth it out. Next time maybe.

Posted by Jeremy at August 29, 2004 1:02 AM