Grab Bag #42

We have Halloween and Día de los Muertos this week. Over the past few days on my road trip to New Orleans for the National Trust of Historic Places annual conference I paid my own appropriate homage to ancestors.

How will San Francisco history find its way into this Grab Bag? Good question...

San Francisco Peaks

No, not Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, and Mount Sutro. The other San Francisco peaks which people might be aware of in North America is a range of volcanic heights near Flagstaff, Arizona.

Nuva'tukya'ovi in Hopi, the range is a remnant of a stratovolcano that probably went boom about 200,000 years ago. 

I took a hike in nearby Walnut Canyon National Monument, which has some terrific cliff dwellings to appreciate. The creative people who made these unique rooms-with-a-view lived there for about 150 years in the 1100s and 1200s.

The story has been that years of drought and/or possible warfare made the site untenable and so it was abandoned. With that narrative, one can easily jump to pompous moralizing, connections to our time, our wars, our climate change, blah blah blah, and generally treat this amazing place as a cautionary tale and a site of tragedy and loss.