Pictographs, Petroglyphs and Potsherds are the clues to hidden treasure in pure daylight at two National Parks in the American Southwest.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Parks are located in the Four Corners area of the Southwest: Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Bears Ears, the largest park in the United States at 1.9 million acres, was designated a National Monument (Park) by President Obama in 2017 after thirty Native American tribes, including the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Zuni, Paiute, and Apache, advocated for its protection as a sacred site.
The pre-puebloan people known as the Anasazi disappeared from this land by the 13th century, leaving behind their petroglyphs, pictographs and potsherds, a mysterious gift to explore.
“This place is a part of the history of all the Native peoples in this region. It’s like a book for us, and when many tribes have a chapter in this book, it tells us a lot about why we are the way we are. But it’s also part of the history of the peoples of the United States and the world.”— Jim Enote, Pueblo of Zuni
Bears Ears (1.9 million acres, designated by Obama, 2017) and Grand Staircase Escalante (designated by Clinton, 1996) contains 4,000 years of Native American culture.
In Grand Staircase Escalante National Park are buried the richest deposit of dinosaur bones in the world, with fossils 75 million years old. So far twenty-five new species of dinosaurs have been discovered.
There was danger that these precious parks would be destroyed to make National Park land ripe for “development”, i.e., private mining, fracking, conglomerate agriculture, and industrial off-road recreation. An extremely rare dig of dinosaur fossils was looted before development could be stopped.
I wrote my novels of the ancient Southwest after traveling to the Four Corners, amazed to realize that here in the American desert was over 100,000 sites of Native American archeology. Click on the YouTube video “Stones of Chaco Canyon” and feel the magic that led me to write Sundagger.net and Spiral.
The famed mystery writer of the Southwest wrote the above advice to me the last year before his death in 2008. We had been corresponding since before I published my novel of the ancient Anasazi of the Southwest, Sundagger.net. In a note to him, I had been complaining, whining really, about my writing life.
‘re like me, you loved all the Tony Hillerman books. To honor this famed mystery writer of the Southwest, I’m having library readings at Sonoma County libraries and I’d like to invite you. As you see, I already had one reading event on September 16th–thank you to everyone who came. It was inspiring!
After receiving this letter, I revised a chapter in Sundagger.net where a group from the San Francisco area set out on a camping trip to experience a vision quest of their own and end up in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, home of the ancient Anasazi. During my event, I talk about the letter and read sections from the chapter.
