Ranch Animals

Last week I returned to the washes that lay to the right when I was following the road south of my fence. The thing that originally struck me was that the wash stopped at the fence that marked the boundary with pueblo land.

I couldn’t see how nature would respect mere strings of barbed wire and sapling posts. I supposed it was possible, given the way the land varies, that whoever claimed land out of the pueblo grant followed some natural indicator, say the variety of grass which reflected something about the underlying soil structure, but I really couldn’t credit the idea much.

I turned to follow the fence towards the arroyo and found something strange. Maybe ten feet to the side of the barbed wire boundary was a line of farm fence topped by several lines of barbed wire creating a sort of no-man’s land between. The gully began at the farm fence post.

The lane ended abruptly with a line of barbed wire cutting between the two fences and a wash that made it nearly impossible to walk by. The boundary fence continued to the arroyo; the farm fence stopped. It could have been some kind of animal enclosure, but I couldn’t really see what or why.

Yesterday, I went back to the near arroyo to follow the right bank back to the cactus field. The arroyo maintained its lake like appearance on this side of a barbed wire fence marking the pueblo boundary.

I followed the bank back to its farthest corner where I found the remains of wooden chutes used in some way to corral animals. If the current width is any indication, it was probably sheep rather than cattle.

There had been similar remains on my uphill neighbor’s land and in the barbarian’s wash near the road, but they’ve since been cleared away.

As I looked out over the land, the eroded gullies were, for the most part, limited to the private side of the fence like they were further south.

I now wondered exactly what animals could have done to precipitate the natural forces that were uncovering the older landscape. If the contours existed then, I suppose they would have followed the valleys were grass might be lusher and eaten the ground bare, leaving it open to wind and water.

I suppose it’s also possible that the softer spots in the land caved under their weight, and those low spots became the targets of the weather. Between the gullies, the land remains grassy knolls that hide the open trenches. The steppe scrub that returns with overgrazing appears in limited patches in the washes and nearest the road and ATV trails.

Fossils

Even when confronted with the rapid obsolescence of computers and cell phones and cameras, one can still lose sight of how much has changed in science since the men at Los Alamos set off their first test explosion.

Grade school is still the time we learn about the geologic past. Young boys are still infatuated with the Jurassic age of dinosaurs. For some reason, I got struck by the Pennsylvanian era of swamps and evergreens when coal was being formed.

Back in those days in the middle 1950's, the world began with the Precambrian. I never thought why, it was simply so. At that age, one didn’t consider the wonders of zero either or worry about negative numbers. One simply learned to count, one, two, three.

While I was reading Ted Galusha and John Blick’s article on Tertiary sediments in the Española basin, I suddenly realized why. When I was a child a principal way to date rocks was with fossils. There were no fossils before the Precambrian age. There was no life as we know it to produce fossils. The beginning of life was the beginning of rocks.

Oh, there was something called the Archaean to account for those things that were obviously below, but had no retrievable history. They simply existed after the big bang and solidification of the earth’s crust, but before time.

The problem with fossils is they often are dated by the strata in which they are found. In turn, they are used to date other strata in a closed, self-referencing system with few points of independent verification.

The whole time I was reading Galusha and Blick, all I really wanted to know was how old are the rocks Daniel Koning says lie under my house and how did they get there. Their answer was:

“The Tesuque Formation apparently was deposited through part of the Hemingfordian, Barstovian, and most, if not all, of Clarendonian (early Pliocene) time.”

To get anything more specific than late Miocene, I had to look up those fossil groups, which were filled with animals both strange (camels, rhinos, horses) and extinct (oreodonts), many of which migrated across the Bering land bridge.

At least, when you do go on-line for information, there are artists’ attempts to grapple with what those bones looked like when they were moving about. They don’t answer my questions about age, but they are diverting.

Dating techniques were beginning to change when I was a child. At Enrico Fermi’s University of Chicago, where so much preliminary research into the nature of matter and the predictable half lives of radioactive isotopes was done that lead to the bomb, Willard Libby was applying the same model to carbon to develop methods for using the carbon-14 isotope to date items that contained carbon.

By the time I was in college, his methods were being accepted, but they were only good for 62 million years. That’s the Tertiary Eocene. It could date a mastodon, but not a dinosaur. Still that was more than adequate for me. I was becoming an historian, not a zoologist or geologist.

Since I last paid attention, engineers have used all those technical skills that led to things like computers and satellites used by cell phones to develop other tools for probing the past. They send electromagnetic signals and interpret the resonances. They use the half-lives of other elements like potassium and argon. Their papers become tables of graphs and columns of numbers one has to take as true while looking for the scattered intelligible words in sentences like:

“Other east-west gravity profiles between latitudes 32^o and 38^o also show this asthenospheric diapir, which thus forms a ridge-like Moho unwarp approximately parallel to the surface trace of the rift.”

Thank God for Google and the ability to look up any word, to learn aesthenospheric refers to the mantle and Moho the boundary between the mantle and the crust, to learn something detectable exists deep in the earth below the rift valley that may account for all the geologic activity.

These tools which I have to take with the same faith I once took the word Precambrian are probing the time when the plates were colliding billions, not millions, of years ago. That really is astounding. The latest Geological Society of American time scale breaks the Archaean into four phases and has a created a new “dates unknown” period, the Hadean for older than 3.8 billion.

Mastodons

The first time I heard of a mastodon I was sitting in a lecture hall at Michigan State listening to Russel B. Nye, who often combined cultural history with American literature.

I don’t remember what he said beyond a nearly complete skeleton found in Ohio had caused quite a sensation in the early nineteenth century. Somehow, I got the idea the skeleton was lying, fully exposed, on top of the ground and was stumbled upon much like the mounds had been.

I’ve since heard the animal was a glacier age mammal hunted by people using Clovis points. For some reason, that led me to think of them as great grass eaters.

When one’s interest in a subject is superficial, one’s knowledge tends to become a brew of facts, romantic legends and false conjectures.

I was, understandably, quite startled to find someone I think was Francis Klett say:

“In these beds, near Ildefonso, I made some excavations in 1873, while on the way to Fort Defiance under your expedition, (division 2,) and brought to light fossil bones of a mastodon, only one of them perfect, however; others were broken and yielded but fragments.”

The quotation is from the 1873 Annual Report of George’s Wheeler’s Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, and the location must be somewhere just north of route 502. That’s almost as close as the Otowi Bridge.

I suddenly needed to know more about mastodons. As I read, accretions of secretly hoarded facts dissolved.

It was true mastodons were glacial creatures and had been found in association with Clovis points.

However, they were associated with cold spruce woodlands, not grassland refuges.

Spruce growing where grass has been having a hard time surviving this year's drought.

Spruce near the Otowi bridge when those boulders blocked the Rio Grande creating lakes.

Spruce along those arroyos with the Qayi late-glacial sediments identified by Daniel Koning.

Spruce in my backyard. Who cares about a mastodon eating the foliage. Cold climate spruce right here where I’m writing.

Spruce.