Day 9, June 11

I was quite slow this morning in getting up. I was awake at the usual time of six, but for some reason it took me at least half an hour to really wake up all the way. That’s quite unusual for me. Once I was finally up with my lunch packed, breakfast consumed, and bags packed, we headed out to the site for the day. We met up with John again ad decided how we wanted to structure our day. After talking to Jeanette about the features she had spotted the previous day we decided to start out on the south side of the valley. We crawled under some electric fences in order to get to the ridges foothills. As we scoured the slopes we came across a couple very clear terraces and the remnants of what was most likely terraces that had been heavily disturbed. We followed this particular canyon up all the way to the bedrock cliff face on Jessica’s suggestion. Here there was a concrete well that collected water from a spring that emerged from the cliff face. It was mentioned by the owner previously as being built by his great grandfather and still an active water source. At this point John and I climbed up to the rim in order to get a better view. It was a bit precarious but the field of view that it afforded was well worth it. We continued towards the east and then came across a fantastic stone wall. It extended extremely far up the slope running in a north south fashion. We mapped these features as best we could given the heavy vegetation cover and lack of satellite visibility. We then headed back down the valley floor for a short lunch stop.

The second half of the work day was much more uncomfortable with the heat starting to climb and the slopes beginning to increase in grade. We went to the north side in order to check out some features that we had seen from the other side and thought might be terraces. The grade was extremely taxing and were sweating up a storm by the time reached our target destination. There was some stone scatter, but nothing definitive, which was disappointing after such a hard hike. As we were descending I happened to notice a huge boulder in a heavily vegetated area so we went over to take a closer look. We soon discovered that it seemed to be a very large stone feature of unknown use. This was the second or third of this kind that we had found. All of them seem to have been under dense vegetation and brush. This is probably because it grows around the stones since the cows cannot eat the grass in the area. Jessica also noticed the presense of a distinctive looking tree with red plumes athat accompanied the sites we found. This may complete coincidence or it may not. The incredibly thick plant cave makes both seeing features and navigating through them extremely difficult. I hasd so many hundreds of stickers on my pants that you could hardly see the fabric underneath in plaeces. Courtney and Adudrey were nice enough to help me scape them all of after we got back. We headed home and discussed the plan for tomorrows work. We hope to visit the norh eastern part of the slope especially the feature that Courtney foun consisteing of a burnt out hollow. I am very grateful that my cohorts are nice enough to keep their eyes open for things that may be of interest to our group.

Once back at home we had a lovely dinner and Courtney and I did the dishes sinceit was our day to do so. Afterwards Jussica and I worked on getting our Trimble to connect. After over an hour of frustrated trouble shooting we finally were able to download our data by using a different computer. We then had to modify our data dictionary to work correctly. It took a while to get everything worked out and it was a relief when we finally did. There was much groaning at the computer in the process. Now I’m more than grateful to be going to bed because it’s been a long day indeed.