Dear Friends and Family,                                 October 4, 2015

We couldn't send our blog last night because our Hogan in the desert didn't have an internet connection. Go figure! So here is what we wrote last night……..

Today we left Salida and continued our adventure to Crow Canyon! We saw the color of the aspens changing and all of the beautiful mountains. We stopped in Pagosa Springs for a tailgate lunch. To our surprised we saw a little museum with a couple of old houses, a school, a library and a big shop. Most of them we got to go into. They were from the late 1800’s. Maryn played an old piano!

After lunch, we got back on the road. On the way to Cortez we listened to our new book Fablehaven! Now we are on chapter 6.  Anyway, we where so excited to be on the road and on are way. We were driving and we turned a bend and then saw the gigantic mountain called the Sleeping Ute mountain. It really looked like a sleeping person!

On the drive we made lots of observations about what we saw. Then we made inferences about those observations.  We observed gullies on the sides of the mountains. We inferred that it was from water erosion. We will do lots of observing and inferring.

When we finally got to Crow Canyon we  got to the office.  We met a woman named Dora, and she showed us the Hogan where we are going to live. There were four twin beds and a bunk bed. Maryn took the top bunk of the bunk bed, Colter and Linda pushed their twin beds together to make a two big beds so they each had a huge bed to sleep in.

The Crow Canyon campus is different than we imagined. We pictured sand dunes and tumble weeds and cactus. But actually, we are surrounded by sagebrush, pinion pines and juniper trees.  Near the campus is a vast valley with lots of canyons and hills. There is a replica of a pueblo on the next hill over. In the far distance we can see the cliffs where Mesa Verde is.

We ate a wonderful linguine dinner with spaghetti sauce and meat balls for the carnivore.  The dining hall is huge, meant to fit 60 people. We sat with vacationing archaeologist who told us about their past adventures looking for the remnants of the ancient native Americans. One lady found a skull, but she was required to stop digging out of respect to the Ancestral Puebloan culture.

After dinner we met Katie, our instructor. She gave us an introduction to Crow Canyon and the rules here. She also talked about the Mesa Verde region.

We talked with Katie about our research questions. Colter’s research question is how do the Ancestral Puebloans hunt the animals and what kind of animals.  Maryn’s question was about what kind of food did the Ancestral Puebloans eat and gather and farm.  Katie said we will lots of cool people who can help us answer our questions.

We had our own private lecture and we knew a lot of the information but we learned some new things as well.

We were laying on the bed as we listened to a story about a young Paleoindian boy who was going on a hunt. It's about what we are studying. 

This is a picture of us after breakfast this morning. It was a beautiful sunrise.

Tomorrow we are going down in the lab to dig up our own artifacts. Hopefully we’ll get something cool!