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AmericaQuest: The Adventure Begins!
It's a moonless night and I'm beat tired, freezing cold and sitting cross-legged in a pup tent. Our camp perches over an ice-crusted river on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. Downstream, through a patch of mud and quicksand and up over a hill lies Keet Seel, perhaps the most extraordinary ancient ruin in North America. The AmericaQuest team walked eight hours, each with a 60 pound pack on their back, to get here. Along with our food (mostly oatmeal, beans and PowerBars), water (16 gallons), tents, sleeping bags, clothes and journals, we had to carry laptops and batteries for the 4 pound satellite dish we're using to transmit this back to the Web.
We've just completed the first day of AmericaQuest, an interactive expedition. For the next four weeks, we'll bike and hike around New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Southern Arizona -- the Four Corners region -- to solve one of North America's greatest ancient mysteries: "Why did the Anasazi Civilization collapse and the people abandon their homes on the Colorado Plateau?" Eight hundred years ago, some 150,000 Anasazi lived in the canyons, among the buttes and on the mesas here in the American Southwest. They had sophisticated knowledge of astronomy, figured out how to grow food in this dry, cracked terrain, built over a thousand miles of arrow-straight roads, and had, until the 1860s, the tallest apartment building in North America. For some reason, the ancient Anasazi abandoned their settlements and left their homes. Some of the abandoned settlements include: Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Bandelier, Canyon de Chelly -- and Keet Seel. I caught a glimpse of Keet Seel before I set up my tent. Set back in an enormous cave, sheltered by hundreds of feet of overhanging sandstone, lies the 154-room town. It looks as if the people who lived there left last week: walls of twigs and mortar, airy towers, ceremonial kivas, and a 180-foot retaining wall look as pristine as they must have when the people built them in the mid-late 13th century. We chose Keet Seel to start AmericaQuest because this place speaks to our mystery better than any other place. Keet Seel was in its glory at the exact time when things were falling apart for other settlements around them. But here, too, the people left abruptly and by 1300, Keet Seel was a ghost town. Does a clue lie here that can help us solve the mystery?
Over the next two days, our archaeologist John Fox will comb through these ruins and the surrounding area. Christina Allen, our biologist, will assess the surrounding environment for further evidence. Meanwhile, our teammate Christine Suina, a Cochiti Pueblo Indian -- a descendent of the Anasazi -- will contribute a Native American perspective. Tom Adair, Deborah Hart and David McClain, will serve as your eyes and ears as they capture daily photos and videos. Jerome Thelia, our technologist, manages the daily satellite link between the team in the field and the team sitting at their computers in homes and schools throughout the United States and 122 other countries. Our best chance of helping solve this mystery lies with those of you who will tell us where to look for clues, help us make logistical decisions and ultimately propose our own theory for the Anasazi collapse. For the moment though, I'm going to log off, eat a plate a beans, and crawl into my sleeping bag. At sunrise, we'll climb the steep ladder leading into Keet Seel and let the mystery unfold. Pedals Up! Dan RELATED SITES: AmericaQuest |
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