Three Rivers Petroglyph

Thursday, August 5 - It's still hot so we tried to get an early start to see the Three Rivers Petroglyph, an unusual art form of the ancients who used to live in this area. It is believed that the Native Americans, whom we used to name Anastasia and now name Jornada Mogollon, created this interesting art work by scratching off the black layer of the rocks to expose the white rock underneath.  They are anywhere from 2000 years old to just 400 years old. No one knows why they did this or what is the meaning of the drawings. The obvious ones are of animals such as sheep, fish, snakes, lizards and birds. There are pictures of faces or possibly masks. One Petroglyph that appears over 10% of the time is a circle with dots all around it.  We also saw numerous geometric shapes.  Of the 20,000 pictures in this area, we only saw maybe 100 of them. 

To escape the heat, we left the Valley of Fire and headed to Manzano Mountain State Park at the base of the Manzano Mountains about a 100 miles south and east of Albuquerque. With just a little bit of elevation and lots of pine trees, we are actually enjoying the summer in New Mexico.