A Window to the Past
I have always been rather fascinated with the ruins scattered around the southwest, built a thousand or more years ago by a culture we know as the Ancestral Puebloans (once called the Anasazis). You almost can't hike a canyon in southeastern Utah or southwestern Colorado without finding some ruin tucked away high up on a cliff or perched precariously on the edge of a sandstone precipice.
I think it's the imagining of what their life must have been like that piques my curiosity. Trying to picture them building these carefully crafted structures which still bear their fingerprints in many cases; picturing women grinding corn while the kids play nearby; picturing them sitting in the warm winter sun of their south-facing veranda with the fresh fluffy snow of a recent storm blanketing the landscape around them. All of these images fill my mind as I sit and admire the ruins of once spectacular structures.
A recent trip to Hovenweep and Canyon of the Ancients was no exception. I admire these places because, as the light seeps through the window in this picture, images of the past seeps through these ruins in my mind. Each ruin is in itself, a window to the past.