Monday, September 28, 2009

822 Miles - 9/25/09

f-i-n-a-l-l-y getting around to blogging about last weekend. I've got to since we're off again tomorrow on another "Making Memories" adventure.

Last weekend in a nutshell...Friday we left Casper to spend the night in Alpine (#5) which is on the border of Idaho...Saturday we drove to Driggs, Idaho (#6) to visit old friends...went back into Wyoming to spend the night in Jackson Hole (#7) with some more friends...Sunday we left for home.

Now it's time to get more specific in other blogs, so rEAd on...

Monday, September 21, 2009

Our "Squashed" Veggies

This is what the hail and 90 mph winds did to our zuchinni and yellow squash plants last night during the thunderstorm. Even the poor veggies look like they have zits! Then coming home today, I saw where 5 inches of reported snow fell on Casper Mountain from the storm. What happened to fall around here, y'all?

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Come Hail Or High Water

We've now lived here in Wyoming for over nine months. During that time, I've experienced less than one dozen thunderstorms. When there have been storms associated with lightning, it is absolutely incredible with blazing, sharp flashes of light that make my hairs stand up - most likely from fear!

Tonight our tv programming was interrupted for a special weather bulletin as the sirens were going off in the city. We were being warned about a severe thunderstorm and what time it should reach us and to be prepared. I put down all the windows since the wind began to increase and then, right on cue, the storm began. It sounded as though hard popcorn was hitting the windows and when I looked outside this is what I found falling... pea-sized hail. There was so much of it, it looked like snow (and we're supposed to get some of that some time tonight). Even the street and my car were covered in hail. Some people got quarter-sized hail, so we feel very lucky!
Joe is holding some of the hail I scooped up by our front door (the yellow stuff are tiny leaves which got blown off one of our trees).

The temperature tonight is supposed to get down to 34 degrees tonight and 27 degrees tomorrow night. Yep, we ain't in Georgia anymore with weather like this in September!

A Day Of Frolicking for the Furry Kids

Joe and I took the furry kids out for a little fun on Friday. First we went to a dog park next to the Platte River and they went swimming. Surprisingly, B.J. went swimming more than Blaze. B.J. chased thrown sticks out in the river and Blaze just hopped around in the water near the edge.
Blaze going to take away B.J.'s retrieve stick.
B.J. did this over and over again and loved it! Then we went to another park for them to dry off and run.
Blaze loved this park. She ran and ran and ran and ran....
Happy dogs...

More Pictograph Cave Pics

These are more pictures taken when hiking up to the caves...
Get a room guys!
Joe taking a rest and looking at the view at the same time...
It looks like the cave has boobies (complete with nipples)... Strange formation, huh?

Pictograph Cave State Park - Billings, Montana

Not far from Billings at the end of a winding ribbon of pavement is Pictograph Cave State Park, a cluster of caves where for five thousand years prehistoric hunters and their historic American Indian counterparts left behind a legacy of painted images and artifacts. We stopped here on our way home. Many of the pictures are difficult to see since they are fading. But one of the interesting pictures was the drawings of rifles.

Flanked by Ghost Cave and Middle Cave on one side and a spring on the other, Pictograph Cave is the largest of three rock shelters nestled into sandstone bluffs overlooking Bitter Creek. In the early 1900s the "Indian Caves," as the locals often called them, were a popular stopping place along the stage route between Billings and the town of Coburn on the Crow Indian Reservation. The curious often stopped to explore the caves, while others found the fresh spring water and cool shade of the nearby box elder trees a welcome respite from the dusty road.
Although the paintings of Pictograph Cave were well known to early residents of Billings, the site attracted national interest in 1937 when amateur archaeologists discovered deep deposits of prehistoric artifacts in the cave's floor. Within months the Montana Highway Commission acquired the site and a Works Progress Administration (WPA) excavation was underway, directed by H. Melville Sayre from the Montana School of Mines. Sayre documented 106 pictographs inside the cave. The walls were a collage of red, white, and, occasionally, yellow figures over earlier designs painted in black. Images of coup sticks and warriors in full regalia mingled with turtles, bears, and bison.
Sayre hired Oscar Lewis, an archaeologist from a Glendive WPA crew, to supervise the archaeological excavation at Pictograph Cave. The dig uncovered an assortment of stone and bone tools, projectile points, a carved amulet, pottery shards, and burned bone. The deeper deposits revealed artifacts from the Middle Prehistoric Period (3000 b.c. to 500 a.d.) when roving bands hunted game with stone-tipped spears and darts, but also relied heavily on wild plants and seeds for food. Levels closer to the surface indicated a series of Late Prehistoric occupations (500 a.d. to 1800 a.d.) by nomadic buffalo hunters armed with bows and arrows.

Archaeologists discovered a number of perishable items from this period-basketry, a hafted knife, roasted turnips in hearths, and beds of woven twigs and leaves-that would have been lost in an exposed site. Evidence indicated that nomadic hunters abandoned the shelter of the caves in favor of camping in tepees on the terrace below at about the time the horse was introduced on the plains in the 1700s. "The importance of Inscription Cave [Pictograph Cave], archaeologically," Walter Vanaman, a surveyor for the Montana Highway Commission, wrote in a 1938 report, "is more in the completeness of the picture it presents than in being spectacular in any one phase."
When the archaeologists began investigating the other caves and the surrounding area, they found that late prehistoric groups had also lived in Ghost Cave. Middle Cave, however, had no evidence of habitation. On the terrace below the caves, the crew unearthed historic artifacts and remnants of a prehistoric lodge. They also found the remains of at least nine individuals in and around the caves, including those of one who had been crushed by falling rock. Some human bones had the same burn and teeth marks as bison bones found in the caves, leading to speculations of cannibalism.

Heading Home From Lennep