Lost and Found

Sadly, I'm marching my Alaska post (saga) down the page into blog oblivion (aka archives) with these inane posts (happily: my BS in Biology post has disappeared), but so it goes...

Is this a real (old, Indian--I'm not asking if it is actually in existence...) arrowhead? It certainly looks authentic to me (it's not as perfectly as symmetrical as I thought it should be), and I found it out hiking on a trail earlier this year--it was slightly off the trail in the dirt, kind of in the middle of nowhere...If so, it's the first one I've ever found.

One time, while hunting in Abilene, TX, a friend and I came across an old trash pile. My buddy spotted several old glass medicine bottles and jars down in there--they were thick, wavy cut glass and were pretty cool. Some were clear and some were green-tinted. I think he broke most of them with rocks.

Another time, I was walking in the post oak woods of north Texas, and I saw a rusty piece of metal jutting out of the ground about two feet. Upon further inspection I discovered an entire horse-drawn wagon frame buried in the ground (sans horse). The metal piece that first caught my attention was the brake handle. The metal wheels were still attached and barely arched out of the ground. I became fixated (have you ever read "The Tommyknockers"?) with digging out the perimeter, and then I grabbed the brake handle and tried to pry it loose. It weighed a ton and I couldn't budge it.

Another time I was deer hunting in Montague county in North Central Texas, and I found myself in a very weird-looking landscape. The land had a very unusual topography and overall feel-- there were huge sharply defined crevices where it looked like the earth had been recently ripped open. I looked down to the bottom of one of these 40-foot-deep crevices and saw what I would swear was a shoulder bone (scapula)--only it was HUGE--about 4-6 feet across! Later, I found out that this area is known for multiple large dinosaur finds. I told an acquaintence, a geologist, about it and he literally drooled right in front of me (embarrassing). I guess we couldn't go back there, because the doctor that owned the land was put into prison for something or other...(actually I know this story exactly but it is a blog entry in itself and I may need to take the 5th).

When I was in Alaska, one memorable moment occurred when I was traveling on the highway and the guy I was riding with, an Alaska native, pointed to the right.

"That way is Anchorage and Denali."

Then, casually pointing left, he said "If you get a few miles into the woods in this direction, suddenly you're where modern man hasn't been. It's over a hundred miles before you get anywhere close to where people live..." That was enough to make my head spin. My mind wandered to thoughts of prehistoric people living in that land, gold miners on dogsleds, how quiet and still and clean it must be. A little overwhelming, but it's good to know that there are still places like that where you can really get lost.