Tepees and Puerco Pueblo

nobody@vox.com(Paxton) — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:46:36 -0600

This continues the documentation of our recent trip to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

This is a pull-off north of the Blue Mesa area in the park called Tepees. There are no actual tepees here, but I guess someone thought that the badland formations here looked like tepees. They are somewhat pyramid-like. This is also a virtual geocache, so I took a pic of Strix standing in the foreground holding our GPS to prove we were there.

Puerco Sign

Our next stop was Puerco Pueblo, which is a small ruins area in the park. No, I don't know why it's called Pig Village, though there is a Rio Puerco that runs through New Mexico and joins into the Colorado River, which of course runs through Arizona. But then the question is why is the river called Pig River? There are some questions we are not meant to answer.

The ruins site is not much to see after you've been to Chaco Canyon, but it's still interesting.

Petroglyphs found at the Puerco Pueblo site.

Puerco Petroglyphs 3 detail

This is a detail of one of the pics above. This has to be the most humorous petroglyph I've ever seen. Strix calls this one, "I said put me down!" Did the "artist" mean for it to be funny? Was it a horror story about a thirty-foot tall bird that ate humans? Is, in fact, this an attempt at perspective, and the man is actually supposed to be in the background? We'll never know.

Tomorrow: Route 66 Monument

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Destination Unknown

Tepees and Puerco Pueblo