August 8-9, 2011

August 8-9, 2011

With this week’s stock market crash putting a major crimp on our cash flow, we stopped in Amarillo on our westward journey to mooch a free place to stay with Aimee’s sister. I worked off our indebtedness doing some handy man work around the house.

From Amarillo, TX we drove two hours southwest across the border to Clovis, NM. In archeological circles, Clovis is world famous. In countless museums and TV documentaries, I kept hearing about “Clovis points”. I had to stop and find out what was so special about these old Indian arrowheads.

Our first stop is the Blackwater Draw dig, where we are greeted by a very talkative grad student of Eastern New Mexico University. He turns out to be a fountain of information. The migration of man to North America was thought to be a recent phenomenon until arrowheads were discovered here in 1929 inside a fossilized Mammoth skeleton. Radiocarbon analysis dated it to 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. The arrowheads have a distinctive fluting, differentiating them from later cultures. Since that discovery Ice-Age “Clovis sites” have now been found throughout North America. It was interesting to note that the flint for these arrowheads came from the Alibates quarry north of Amarillo that we visited 18 months ago.

We walked the trail that circles the dig site reading the interpretative signs. At the end of the Ice Age, this area was much cooler and a spring-fed lake here attracted all the mega mammals of the era from mammoth to camel to saber toothed tiger. All over this former gravel quarry archeologists have found bone beds mixed with Clovis points.

From the dig site we drive twelve miles to the Blackwater Draw Museum. It is pretty good but it has way more information than we have time for today. For some reason the Clovis culture disappeared at the same time many of the mega fauna went extinct. Some blame it on over hunting by the Clovis while others think a comet struck the earth.


Continuing southwest, we are on the lookout for cooler weather. We find it again crossing the mountains of central New Mexico. We take a short break from driving and visit Smokey Bear Historical Park. In 1944, the forest service began using the character of Smokey to promote fire safety. In 1950 a small bear cub was found badly burned clinging to a tree near here. He immediately became the personification of the advertising. We breeze thru a small museum on the history of Smokey and then walk to see his gravesite. Smokey Bear is one of the most recognizable characters throughout the world.

From Capitan, NM we drive the rest of the day arriving home to Tucson very late.