On The Road – Albatrossity – Time, on the Picketwire

Our campsite was in Vogel Canyon, aptly enough, although vogelsong was not apparent in the late fall. So this photo-essay has no pictures of birds, other than this landscape named after the birds. And some footprints of their legendary ancestors. Here is the sunset from our campsite that evening.

The river is not much to look at, even for this semi-desert landscape.

The destination was a hard-bottom crossing, where the locals used to cross with their farm wagons until a bridge was built a few miles away at the now-vanished town of Higbee. They noted the large depressions in the rocky bottom, and referred to them as “elephant tracks”. They are, of course, much larger than elephant tracks, and are the signs that large vegetarian sauropods as well as smaller carnivorous allosaurs lived here millions of years ago.

Many of the sauropod tracks were large enough that one could soak their feet in them. Sadly they contained no water, only dust. Poet and essayist included for scale.

Carnivore tracks were not as common, but there were still many to see. Here’s one with the standard “Swiss Army knife for scale” unit of measurement included.

Another set of allosaur tracks.

The trail into and out of the canyon also has some interesting signs of past human habitation. This is said to be a “morada”, an outpost of the religious sect known as the Penitentes. This part of Colorado was pretty much ignored by the Spanish governors and missionaries; an 1812 assessment documents that there were only 22 missionaries and 2 regular priests in an area with 102 Spanish settlements and 26 Pueblos. In the absence of higher-level religious guidance, a lay religous sect, La Fraternidad Piasoda de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno (the Pious Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus of Nazareth), also known as the Penitentes, grew and flourished. The tenets of this sect included severe physical punishment, including self-flagellation and re-enactments of the Crucifixion. The established church frowned on these activities (despite encouraging them in previous centuries), but the Penitentes continued their practices, sometimes secretly, well into the latter half of the 19th Century.

Another view of the canyon walls from the hike out.

In June of the next year we went back to this area (Elizabeth was researching an essay which later appeared in the Georgia Review Vol. 59, No. 3 (FALL 2005), pp. 514-530, and was also included in her essay collection “In the Mind’s Eye“) for some additional exploring. We found the cemetery at Higbee, which contained not only a couple of headstones made of petrified wood, but also this sandstone one, which was pretty much been erased by the constant winds and sunshine that it was exposed to. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The dinosaur trackway was first brought to the public eye by a report from a local ranch girl, Betty Jo Riddenoure, who reported the elephant tracks to her teacher, and the teacher passed that along to folks who eventually got the attention of the American Museum of Natural History. R.T. Bird and John Stuart MacClary examined the site, and the pair had a tiny article in Life Magazine in 1936, showing some of the tracks. An additional article in National Geographic appeared in 1938. None of these show the original observer, Betty Jo Riddenoure, but this photo from a grade school group picture in 1933 (from the museum in La Junta) includes her, second from the right in the middle row. She was still alive and living in Arizona in 2004, and Elizabeth’s essay, mentioned above, has an account of her correspondence with Betty Jo.