Cedar Mesa Ruins, Beauty, and Ancient Truth
fragrant evening primrose
wallflower
Double Stack Ruin with Desert Varnish
Double Stack Ruin
cocklebur in masonry
corn cob in masonry
metate at Double stack ruin
Handprints at Double Stack Ruin
Handprints at Double Stack ruins
Double Stack handprints
"Double Stack Ruins is a short hike," our friend, Pete, assures us after he parks the truck in an unmarked parking spot off a dirt road. "About a half mile."
Having been to Cedar Mesa, Utah, before, Pete is our unofficial guide to this remote area of Ancient Puebloan ruins and petroglyphs.
We grab appropriate gear and head out across lichen-covered slickrock, past juniper trees sporting the blue berries of winter gone and not-yet spring.
The wildflowers distract me.
The five-petaled orange globemallow. The confused fragrant evening primrose (doesn't it know it is morning?). The red flame of the common paintbrush. And the prolific yellow wallflower still waiting to be asked to dance, although the slight breeze is happy to oblige.
I stop again and again to capture their delicate beauty in the sparse landscape.
After the promised short hike, the first stack of ruins looms in the distance, a large square structure with a smaller structure beside it, high above the canyon floor, on a ledge no longer accessible. Desert varnish streaks the sandstone above, a natural deposit of minerals (iron, manganese, magnetite and clay particles) combined with a thin layer of microscopic bacteria. I am amazed to think Ancient Puebloans used ladders or hand holes in the rock to scramble to these dwellings in the cliff.
What did the sufferers of acrophobia do?
Thankfully, the lower set of ruins are easily accessible and require no ninja climbing skills. We wander around the intact walls and marvel at the lone main beam stretching across the stone perimeter of the crumbling wall of a kiva. Embedded in some of the masonry is a mosaic of rocks, corncobs, and cockleburs--artistic designs of an ancient Frank Lloyd Wright who used natural items to bring beauty to a home.
A metate for grinding corn is built into one wall, an inventive addition from an enterprising chef. Although the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) prohibits moving, collecting or taking any artifacts, people before us laid out pot shards, a mano (grinding stone), centuries-old corn cobs, and other items of a farming people who grew corn, beans, and squash.
This beauty and detailed craftsmanship is not all that amazes me.
Stepping back for a wide-angled shot, I capture something I was not prepared to see, located high above the lower ruins.
Handprints. Dozens and dozens of handprints. In rust. In white. In yellow.
Later I would read that the red color could come from hematite, red iron oxide, or red ochre. Yellow came from limonite or rabbit brush and white was derived from clay, silica, gypsum or calcium carbonate. The colors were mixed with water or saliva, yucca root, pinyon gum, or animal fats and applied with fingers, yucca-leaf or corn husk brushes.
Later I would know these things.
For now, I stare awestruck.
It is one thing to intellectually know that ancient people once lived in this Cedar Mesa canyon among the box elder, cottonwoods, and pinyon pine. It is another to see the pictographs of their hands printed above the very homes where they once dwelt, their very fingerprints a testimony to their created work, never knowing that a millennium later archaeologists, scientists, tourists, and adventurers would stand here and try to piece together their silent story.
This one thing I know, as a fellow desert dweller.
In the barren.
In the hard.
There is beauty to be found, if you have eyes to see.
But more than that. In the ruins of a lost language, a story remains, of the importance of physical touch and the lasting imprint human hands can make that reach beyond the confines of time, so that a story - theirs and ours - is never truly silent.
When you are gone, where will your hand prints be found?