Things that make you say hmmmm.....

On an end of the year field trip with J's 5th grade class we went to a national monument here in NM. This is a place where hundreds of years ago people came because there was a bit of water to rest on their way to somewhere else. It has big rock formations and there are hundreds of people's names carved into the stone. What I find interesting is this sign....

Here is a sampling of the signatures we saw on the rock faces. This was by far the fanciest of them. Most were just scratched in names on the surface of all the rock there. The rain also naturally erodes these signatures away (darn that global warming) and so they have to re-carve them every so often. To do this they have to sand a smooth surface to make the viewing of the signatures easier to see and then they set about carving away even more of the rock.
I really shouldn't be taken anywhere because I have a big mouth especially when people say ridiculous things. There was a PAVED trail through the rocks and one of the teachers from our school told us that we needed to stay on the trail because if we didn't it would take 1,000 years for the ground to regenerate. REALLY? Wow, that's some intense statistics there. I'm surprised my backyard isn't a sink hole by now with all the walking that is done on it everyday! Never mind the bulldozers that came in and ripped up the ground to pour the concrete covering up any remaining indigenous tobacco spittle that may have been still on the ground to revere. So, when the unthinkable happened by one of the kids stepping off of the paved trail I blurted out "oh no, that's 1,000 years bad luck!" It was one of those moments where I realized too late that it was actually coming out of my mouth and I was pleasantly surprised when the other adults around me started laughing. Whew, you never know what kind of environmentally passionate kind of people may be around. Anyway, I also found it amusing that a couple of years ago some visitors to the monument scratched their name into the rocks and the monuments solution???? Sand blast the side of the mountain. So now you can look at a scratched up rock mountain rather than signatures that looked like all the rest. I'm a little bummed too that my signature is considered graffiti and someones from a couple hundred years ago is history. Wont mine be history in a few hundred years too? I could end up being a pretty important person. Just sayin'. The final thing that cracked me up is that there is a large portion of the monument where you are walking on large smooth rocks and still they wanted you to stay within a marked trail. How did they accomplish this? By taking a circular saw and grinding into the rock a marked path. Impressive solutions for preserving rock. Sometimes I just marvel at how completely ridiculous we as a society have become full of mixed messages and just complete lunacy. :)
Why a post devoted to this you ask? 'Cause this is the kind of stuff I think about all the time. I love history and love historical sites where important things happened. This particular one though I found humorous. I will leave you with the official description of the monument.
" A reliable waterhole hidden at the base of a sandstone bluff made El Morro (the headland) a popular campsite. Ancestral Puebloans and Spanish and American travelers carved over 2,000 signatures, dates, messages, and petroglyphs for hundreds of years. We invite you to make El Morro a stopping point during your travels."