Pictographs from British Columbia (left) and Gila National Wilderness (right).
We started the morning off by filling out police reports regarding last night’s ordeal. Not because we have any hope of the guy appearing in court – he was just passing through the area on his way home to Pennsylvania – but because we said we would. At this point, it would be easy to pack everything up and head for home, but we decided we couldn’t let some crazy guy ruin our time here, so we’re going to stick it out for a couple of days before moving on to our next site.
We had to wait until after ten o’clock for him to finish packing up and, once he did, we went back to our site where everything was justas we’d left it over twelve hours before. But if I’m to be honest, the grounds, once peaceful and beautiful, had lost all of their appeal.
I needed to clear my mind after breakfast, so I took a walk in one of the nearby canyons. I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere –inside or outside of my head – so I called it quits after an hour or so back to Upper Scorpion where David was taking a nap. When he woke up, we went down to Lower Scorpion and walked along the “Trail of History” to see a small cliff dwelling (I like to call it a single family unit) and a few pictographs that managed to survive the last seven hundred years. The similarities between these drawings and the ones we’ve seen in British Columbia are remarkable. The indigenous people of the time were clearly travellers and, even though we’re familiar with some of the history, can’t help but be amazed every time we see evidence of the migration ourselves.
It had been a windy and long day, so we had a somewhat early evening and were in bed by eight o’clock. While lying there waiting for sleep to take over, I couldn’t help but relive the events of last night in my head. I know I’ll be over it in a couple of days but, until then, every little noise is making my heart race quickly reminding me how lucky we were that nobody got hurt.
A small, three room cliff dwelling in Gil National Forest.
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