Another ruin adventure

Last week, we took another trip to the mountains to find some history. There are so many ruins in New Mexico, it just makes me wish I could have seen it back in the day! It would have been so neat to see these pueblos in their hayday, The drive to the top of the mesa didn't take very long and we found this beautiful tree:

I feel like this year we have been able to see the fall colors much better than last year. It has been beautiful and wonderful. That's my cute husband in the car next to the beautiful tree.

We kept driving and came across this:

We felt a little excited to finally use a saw that I bought Stan last year for Christmas, so Stan began to saw away

And saw...

And then we had a problem. The saw wasn't big enough and the tree had collapsed where we had already cut! Our saw was stuck!! We were able to get the blade out eventually but we did bend it :(

So we had to drive around the tree. And off we went! We got to our take out point, parked the car, and headed out.

As we hiked along we started to see all these white ribbons around the trees. We found that they were marking where there were ruins, sometimes still standing, other times just a pile of rocks that looks like it could have been a small room. We saw a number of these throughout the day as we romped the hills of this mesa (Stan says these mesas are flat on top, but I contest that they are not. I do not get out of breath from walking on flat ground :))

Scott was wearing my sun glasses for a bit, when I looked down, he had them on sideways and thought he was pretty cool.

 Then as we were heading up to the big ruin on the mesa, where maybe up to 2,000 people lived, Stan thought he saw a bone, not uncommon out there. But when he took a closer look, he realized it had painting on it, it was part of a jar!

So then we kept hiking. This ruin hasn't been excavated officially so there wasn't tons to see, but you could tell where kivas would be and the placement of the mounds showed where rooms were. There was also a lot of potsherds on the ground.

Digging underneath these mounds would tell lots of stories

We noticed, in a large open area, this out of place basalt rock. Upon further investigation, it was clearly a metate turned upside down!

Scott and I took a little break while Stan wandered around some. This boy sure is fun and cute. He just about has sitting down like a pro.

He is into eating me these days...

We headed out to find a couple more ruins on the top

and came to this view:

We couldn't quite find the last ruins we were looking for, but on our way back to the car we found some neat ones we weren't expecting:

It was a pretty successful day overall. As we wandered back to the car, the forest was sure interesting. We don't know how long ago fire and storms blew through here, but it looked like a microburst in some spots and a fire in others. Can you find Stan through the tree trunks?