Roxie on the Rinconada Canyon Trail.

Walk This Way

    We rolled into Albuquerque yesterday afternoon to spend some time with Roxie’s sister Mary and husband Bryan. They fetched us at the train station and chauffeured us to their wonderful home on the West side of town.

    Sprawling from the lofty Sandia Mountains to the east and the Albuquerque Volcanic Field to the West, the city is transected by the Rio Grande River. When we crossed it looked more like Rio Diminuta. There was barely more than a trickle of water, another victim of the catastrophic drought in this part of the country.

    Around 600,000 people live here and when you drive on any of the city’s wide boulevards it appears that absolutely none of them ever stays at home. One thing we notice is there are lots of advertising billboards which aren’t allowed in Maine. I looked for one that suggested if we need a lawyer we “Better Call Saul,” from the Breaking Bad franchise which was set in Albuquerque, but haven’t seen one yet.

    Today we appreciate the chance to do some grocery shopping and catch up on laundry. We also hit the trail early at the Petroglyph National Monument which is only a couple miles from Mary and Bryan’s.

    The Rinconada Canyon Trail is a 2.2-mile loop that follows the north side of the canyon to the western headwall which is just a short way from the field’s three extinct volcanic cones. The terrain is mostly loose sand sprinkled with broken chunks of the weathered black lava rock that tumbles down off the plateau. Lizards and centipedes invigorated by last night’s rain showers scurry beneath the mesquite and sagebrush as the morning sun intensifies its attack. No rattlesnakes revealed themselves although a sign on the door inside the visitor center warns to look carefully before stepping outside as they like to sun themselves on the steps.

    Some 400 to 700 years ago Native Americans and later, Spanish settlers, used other rocks to chip away the rock’s black veneer revealing the lighter rock underneath, so that patterns and symbols could be shared. More than 300 can be discovered on this trail.

    While there is some agreement on what individual symbols mean exactly why they were done remains open to speculation as they are not representative of written language as hieroglyphs are. Some hold religious significance while others may only be simple illustrations. Still others may have been made to show the way for travelers. The fact the the glyphs seem to lead directly to the headwall of the canyon where the most gradual route from the floor to plateau can be found adds some credence to that theory. How do you say "walk this way," before the written word?

    On the return trail I wondered about the Ancestral Pueblo people who created these treasures. By 1500 when many images were created, there were 20 pueblos along a sixty-mile stretch of the Rio Grande.

  

 Although done with simple tools, each simple yet elegant petroglyph would have taken a couple hours to complete. There are no water sources anywhere near the canyon today and there is no evidence there were 700 to 400 hundreds of years ago. So there would have been plenty of effort needed to make them.

    The most amazing fact is there are an estimated 25,000 individual petroglyphs along the 17 miles of escarpment in the monument.

    Driving back to the house we passed a couple more of Albuquerque’s more than 100 billboards, touting real estate agents and medical clinics and even one for a personal injury lawyer telling people “Do Not Call Saul.” Another touted the Route 66 Casino where apparently all the women who hang out there are of ample bosom and look like Daisy from the Dukes of Hazard or Ellie-Mae Clampet from the Beverly Hillbillies.

    So much to any claim modern people may have to there being progress in the use of visual media to communicate.