Drove up from Tucson in a spectacular thunderstorm, and I thought the monsoons were almost over....

It have been raining every afternoon and it rained most of last night and all the washes were flowing which is a sight to see. The rain made for some pretty spectacular vistas this morning. I snapped this picture on my way out to check on some sites this morning:

It has been a very busy couple of days here in the Painted Desert. Last weekend my intern and I went to the Pecos Conference. We had a great time. The intern was able to present a poster which was well received and I got to meet several of my neighboring park archaeology folks. My intern left Monday and my Tech left Thursday. That just leaves me and my GIS intern. I spent Tuesday in Albuquerque working on Dissertation stuff and the rest of the week we had people from the regional GIS office down to help us. As I run the Park's GIS program with no formal training it was nice to have a little professional guidance get us on the right track.

On a good note, my work computer has been fixed. So I can now edit photos and access the internet from work. I also reworked our long distance wireless repeater- it runs through three routers which repeats the signal and occasionally creates a problem, but we seem to have decent wireless at house now. However the power went out yesterday during a spectacular thunderstorm and it took until this morning to return.

For the photo this week I chose another set of petroglyphs. What makes these interesting is that they are carved into some very dark patina and the are very jumbled. It appears that as part of some mining exploration in the 1950's these panels were bulldozed off the front of the cliff face. It is a prime example of the impacts that we have had on the prehistoric resources in the region.

I got stuck late at work getting a new GPS ready for field work. While I was waiting I pulled out another petroglyph photo. It also shows how clear the skies can get around here.

Internet has been down for a while out here. I guess that is a benefit and a curse of living in the middle of nowhere. In the last couple of weeks have have visited a lot of the Park's larger and more prominent sites, including the one pictured below. This site is a large, late Pueblo probably a couple hundred rooms, and some incredible ceramics. The site is perched on a badlands knob and the center of the plaza is eroding out, which you can see in the photo.

As the area around the site is unvegetated badlands there are piles of artifacts everywhere.

We will hopefully be conducting more research on this site in the future. So you might see it again...