Point taken,must use Enter more
I must have been late with my meds the previous night
Indepenence weekend is upon us.Down with the British!
Sod that,we're hiding for the weekend,having already being subjected to vast volleys of fireworks going off nearby for the last couple of nights.Rock Springs,southern Wyoming seems a fairly safe refuge from gunpowder happiness for the next few nights.
Its been a bit of an odd one,today has.We started the day with great promise.We'd been too short on time the day before to visit some petroglyphs at a place called Castle Garden,near to Riverton WY,so we'd resolved to turn back on ourselves and remedy the error.
I was quite excited,as I'm becoming something of a prehistoric art junkie.There's a lot of it about,back where I'm from,and although many thousands of years may seperate my local carvings from the glyphs I'm encountering out here,I'm spotting common themes and shapes.
We made the requisite trip out into the wilderness,Castle Gardens being some 40-50 miles from the nearest town of any note.Its not a formal site,there is a trail of sorts around the canyon,which is quite beautiful in itself,but we decided to head straight off the path and explore the site from right to left,following the canyon wall to ensure we didnt miss much.
So it was quite disappointing that the first carvings we encountered were no more than a few years old,some grafitti from some kids out having a bit of fun no doubt.We were not discouraged,and kept going.Our enthusiasm began to wane by the 3rd or 4th panel of recent rubbish scrawled upon the walls.I looked more closely at the latest panel we'd found.I was absolutely aghast.
The modern scatchings had been done straight over the top of old petroglyphs.And so with the next panel.And the next.And so on.My amazement turned to first horror,then sadness.....then bitter fury.I very much doubt that,in all the time I've been interested in stuff historical,that I've ever seen any archaeological site so thoroughly and deliberately trashed.Admittedly,some of the 'modern' damage did date back as far as the 1940's,but I did spot some which was dated as late as last year.Not every panel is spolied.But certainly in the region of half.One of the last we encountered was an absolutely stunning frieze of several shield-type petroglyphs,which were the first I'd seen outside of books,and that cheered me up a bit.
But frankly,that kind of deliberate damage baffles me.There was plenty of open rock to etch inanity upon....why the hell do it straight over the ancient work?And why track so far out into the back country to do it?I feel the culprits should be tracked down,and I'd love the opportunity to etch a few messages of my own,on their faces.Most of the vandals seem to have been good enough to leave their names.
Persistence decided it was probably a good time to push on,and get me more distracted.She'd slipped a little something of her own onto our list of activities.We'd been a little disappointed with our last effort at finding a ghost town,and she'd been puzzling over the web looking for something more substantial.She'd found it though,in the shape of Miner's Delight (also known as Hamilton City),a 19th century boom-and-bust gold mining town,which was conveniently close to where we were passing by.Unfortunately,she'd also forgotten to write down any kind of directions for it,other than a vague splodge on our maps.
For a good 45 minutes or more,we ploughed up and down the highway between Atlantic City and Lander,until just short of the former,in desperation we turned down a BLM dirt road.20 minutes later and dustier,we got lucky,and spotted the old cemetery from the road.I thought it was going to be like the first one we'd encountered.An overgrown graveyard and very little else,but as we came over the top of the hill beside the cemetary,a signpost pointed us down a path into some woods.
Expecting a fool's errand,we followed it through the trees,and across a bridge.A bridge.That seemed to me an awful lot of trouble to go to,if nothing was at the end of it.But after today's earlier disappointment,I wasn't going to raise my expectations.So it was a pleasant surprise to be greeted on the other end with the sight of a derelict cabin.We excitedly ran forwards,to inspect it.Derelict it may have been,and braced internally with a steel rope to prevent collapse,but to me it was as good as discovering an ancient tomb.For the next few minutes,we paced and clucked around it,with an air of fake intelligence,discussing how it was built,who could have lived there,what things they might have seen....Until Persistence spotted another,and we ran towards that one,like excited children.Then she spotted another...and another.It became a mad,joyous paper-chase.
We paused under the verandah of the fourth building we found,a sizeable house,and examined a table of artifacts someone had thoughtfully laid out.Broken bits of this and that,an old shoe-sole,splintered pottery...as good to us as chunks of gold.
A flash of lightning split the air,and a peal of thunder broke our excited mood.We'd failed to notice an approaching thunderstorm,and the rain came down hard.But it didnt matter,we are,after all,British.And well we know that rain will only soak through as far as the skin.We spent far too long investigating the increasingly soggy scene,and it was with great reluctance that we dragged each other back to the car,in tired triumph.