More petroglyphs

 

During our 2014 western trip we visited several sections of Albuquerque’s Petroglyph National Monument.

 

  

Having already done that, on October 15th of this year
we spent only a short while at one section, Boca Negra Canyon.

     

  

The petroglyphed rock above reminds me of a tombstone.
The boulder at the top sported more glyphs than I noticed on any other single stone at Boca Negra Canyon.

 

  

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Even if, like these petroglyphs, you’re of a certain age and you know that among the greatest songwriters for American shows and movies in the 20th century were Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter, you may never have heard of the composer Harry Warren. Born Salvatore Antonio Guaragna in 1893, he later teamed up with various lyricists to write many popular songs, especially for movies. “He wrote the music for the first blockbuster film musical, 42nd Street, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with whom he would collaborate on many musical films.” If you’re familiar with that sort of music, you probably know “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “The Gold Diggers’ Song (We’re in the Money),” “That’s Amore,” “There Will Never Be Another You,” “The More I See You,” “At Last,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “You’ll Never Know,” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

Nevertheles, as William Zinsser noted: “The familiarity of Harry Warren’s songs is matched by the anonymity of the man… he is the invisible man, his career a prime example of the oblivion that cloaked so many writers who cranked out good songs for bad movies.” You’re welcome to read more about Harry Warren.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

More from the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

 

By popular acclaim—or just because I felt like it—here are six more pictures from our
October 12th wanderings at the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site near Tularosa, New Mexico.

 

   

⇡ We might take the main shape as a heart, but is that how whoever made the petroglyph saw it?

 

  

⇡ Is that an animal? Perhaps a rabbit leaping?

⇣ This seems to be another longhorn sheep.

 

 

⇣ In the odd-numbered pictures here, the landscape is as appealing as the petroglyphs.

   

  

⇣ You can conjure up your own tale (or tail) about this one:

 

  

 

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“We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players. We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination.”
— John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court; October 31, 2022.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

 

The road not taken

 

The road not taken on October 12th was Interstate 25 north from Las Cruces the 225 or so miles to Albuquerque, our next three-day base of operations. Instead we headed for Albuquerque by a more circuitous route, initially toward the northeast, that let us stop at the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site near Tularosa, which I’d never heard of till I did research for our New Mexico trip. And a good stop it was. The website says the property is home to more than 21,000 petroglyphs! Within the limits of our hiking I’d say we might have seen a couple of hundred, depending on how you count them. Apparently the best known petroglyph is the one above, which shows a longhorn sheep that has been shot with several arrows.

  

 

⇡ It’s sometimes hard to tell where the representational ends and the non-representational begins.

 

   

⇡ Look at the checkerboard pattern on this animal.

 

 

⇡ Some designs seem purely geometric.

 

  

⇡ Concentric circles with dots were a common motif.
There’s one toward the right in the previous photograph as well.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Petroglyph National Monument again

On June 13th we visited Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque for the second time, our previous visit having been in the fall of 2014. This time we walked a trail we hadn’t on that first visit, the Cliff Base Trail in Boca Negra Canyon.

The third picture gives you a feel for the desert landscape around there.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

What’s that on the flat rock?

As intriguing as the rocks themselves are at the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, when we visited on October 24th we found that some of them also offer up traces of human activity from bygone ages. Click the excerpt below for a much-magnified look at the details on the flat rock.

I wonder whether the ancient inhabitants darkened the surface of this rock so they could scrape it away to create those orange glyphs.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman