some stuff.

It seems a large number of Forest Service employees chew tobacco.

Thus, when refusing dip this summer, I am not awkwardly declining the artichoke variety. I am just awkwardly declining.

Just saying.

In other news, this weekend is the celebration of Pioneer Day in Utah, which they seem to take very seriously here in Monticello. The holiday originally celebrated the coming of Brigham Young to Salt Lake City, but in recent years the state has sought out a more inclusive attitude and expanded it to celebrate all of Utah's history. This means such activities as a mens softball tournement, ring tosses, and potato sac races.

Unfortunately it also means the closure of the following establishments

1. The library
2. The coffee shop
3. The video store
4. The liquor store

Yes...i did try and go to them in that order.

Apparently, however, there are also fireworks. So that might make up for the days absence of entertainment.

Road trips and Rodeo dreams

Telluride, CO and area is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. I've always been a sucker for mountains, but I think even someone who was normally adverse to elevation would have to give in. Of course, the town is beautiful in a way only oodles and oodles of money can produce. Every miners cabin is perfectly painted in bright shades of purple and turquoise with perfectly manicured lawns. The locals have on freshly purchased Chaco sandals and sporty organic fabrics as they ride around on their vintage Cruisers or high end mountain bikes.







It's almost nauseating...or maybe it is nauseating. But endearing, and lovely, and if I had 1.5 million dollars to spend on a 2 bedroom miners cabin, I might give into a life of yuppy-ism. Or maybe I'd live like the other half --working odd jobs, garbage man, construction worker, hiking guide for a roof and a lift ticket. Or maybe just a lift ticket.

I was happy to see that Josh Ritter agreed. He repeated more than twice his desire to return, even though the small opera house was half empty and he is playing in amphitheaters elsewhere ...like Toronto, at the Molson Amphitheater, a long way from the Horseshoe a year ago.

The concert, by the way, was amazing. That man has one of the most endearing stage personalities I have ever seen. He manages to sustain a facial expression the whole show that says

"Wow! You guys are here to see me? This is awesome! Wow!"

I think he genuinely feels that way too, with interjections about growing up in rural Idaho and his career as a paperboy.

sigh. If I could live in the mountains and listen to Josh Ritter weekly I would be a happy girl.

Newspaper rock

Look what I saw last weekend!



Thats right. Petroglyphs are awesome.

age of innocence

This past week was a fellow bunkmate's 21st, so we made the 17 mile drive to the Colorado state line to hit up the nearest bar, aptly named the State Line. We were lucky enough to have a good Mormon boy to be our D-D, though his sobriety guilted us into being relatively abstemious. I don't think he realized our moderation, however, happy to make jokes about how wasted we were (or tatered, as another option. Pass it on).

Though I have little interaction with locals, the interaction I do have has illustrated some of the innocence produced by a life lived in small town religious America.

This first became clear during my CPR/First Aid class in a discussion of blood-born pathogens. Our instructor, as to cover all bases, asked us what the best way to prevent STDs was, and the D-D in question piped up,

"ABSTINENCE!"

A girl next to him penciled it in in our workbook above condoms.

They have obviously been taught well in this town where Mormon seminaries are located on public school property, or at least close enough for no one to be able to tell where one begins and the other ends.

I guess I'm being hard on these recent high school graduates, because it is not as if I was worldly at 18, or for that matter, very worldly now. My high school sobriety and naiveté was punctuated by one drunken night in the Riley Room (Rock me like a hurricane...) and a wild night celebrating the Red Sox victory. It took a wild night of Fabio fame and a 28 year old Uruguayan with saucy intentions to start me down a path towards anything vaguely resembling debauchery. Even through that, however, innocence was mostly retained, and it was only in retrospect that I realized the true significance of those events.

Still, I wonder if and when these kids will have those moments. I wonder if they will bust out of small town Utah and discover that one drink doesn''t make you totally incapacitated.

I kind of hope not

no longer a noob

My favorite part of any new job: No longer being the newest person there.

This week a volunteer started, who is even more clueless than I was when I started. Though this has its drawbacks, it does mean that I get to walk around and act like I know what's going on. I get to offer tips and advice. I give explanations.

I think he is fooled so far. He seems to think I actually know what's going on.

Mission accomplished

The juicy details

So...when I said we hadn't been finding much, I was lying. The sites we were surveying the last few weeks were crammed full of stuff as compared to what we were looking at this week. But over the last 5 weeks, I have learned to appreciate the small finds so much more. I'm getting better at picking out cores and scrapers from rocks, and I actually am getting some sense of when they might date from. Exciting stuff.

I don't have any personal pictures, because I dont want to get grit in my camera, but I have scrounged up some pictures online to give you a general idea of what I'm dealing with. This is similar to stuff we were finding, when life was more exciting.

A lithic scatter (aka, a concentration of stone flakes) looks something like this:

Except instead of obsidian (black volcanic stone) we get white chert.

A lithic scatter is a find we have to document, but finding tools is better. Sometimes we get projectile points or scrapers or something that looks on first glance like something exciting.

Stuff like this! circa 2,000 BCE to CE 500



Mostly our tools look like this though:




Thus concludes more than you needed to know about my personal discovery of stone tools.