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| Cave Creek meander loop, AZ | |
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| | Cave Creek meander loop, AZ | | | |
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Cave Creek meander loop, AZ
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| Hiking | 10.97 Miles |
1,293 AEG |
| | Hiking | 10.97 Miles | 7 Hrs 17 Mns | | 1.59 mph |
| 1,293 ft AEG | 23 Mns Break | | | |
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| no linked trail guides |
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| no partners | | My initial plan was to visit a ruin site my wife and I passed by in 2012 - it's fairly obscure and I thought there might be more (petroglyphs?) to find there.
At some point it popped into my head that I'd pass a fairly well-known trailside petroglyph site and one of the times I'd been there before, a guy guiding a horse trip mentioned there were "mammoth petroglyphs" there. I didn't think much of it at the time.
Anyway, since I was going there again, I did some searching and was surprised to find an Engineering consultancy report written for the landowners in 2004 that "suggested" there were real mammoth glyphs at that site. The horse guy wasn't crazy! But that didn't mean he (they) was right. If those were authentic we'd have heard a lot more about them: I could find no one else suggesting they'd found mammoth glyphs in Arizona, though there is a controversial claim in Utah.
But now I had a second thing to check-out on this walk.
Then the day before I was planning to go I was using that cool HAZ map tool that lets you overlay all the posted GPS tracks on a map, and I saw a relevant one by @Oregon_Hiker in 2014. [ triplog ]
That was a cool and ambitious hike by Larry and gave me another idea to make the day fun. I could use part of it and probably see some more petroglyphs.
This all worked out nicely. I don't do much trail walking but I made good time walking up Cave Creek and the turn off up Larry's ridge led to some nice country and quite a few petroglyphs. I contoured down to the ruin but was disappointed to find it REALLY overgrown and there was not much to see there. I did see a couple cool petroglyphs though.
Then the mammoth hunt. Well there certainly are a couple glyphs which you'd most logically call elephants. But two things argue against mammoths: 1) while near-impossible to judge the age of petroglyphs, these don't even appear to be the oldest ones at the site, 2) nearby there are a few glyphs that look roughly (?) the same age and show men with bow and arrow. Scholars say the atlatl --> bow transition in AZ was only about 1500 years ago. So I'm not buying mammoths.
However I was reminded what a nice site that is and enjoyed looking around it again.
[ youtube video ] |
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