Piedras Marcadas

Discovery, learning, (ad)venturing forth into the unknown – Piedras Marcadas Canyon offers all that. Wonderment. “Marked Rocks” Canyon is part of the Petroglyph National Monument on the west side of Albuquerque. Six volcanoes erupted along the Rio Grande Rift Valley about 150,000 years ago, flowing lava toward the east. It eroded into an escarpment, or long cliff with a steep slope, of basalt rock. More than 20,000 rock carvings can be found along this seventeen-mile-long ridge. Some of the symbols are recognizable – hand or foot prints, bees, dragonflies, lizards, but many remain cloaked in mystery. For indigenous Pueblo people, the entire landscape is sacred. Traditional ceremonies still take place within the monument.

The “Walking Albuquerque” class did two-miles of just that this week in Piedras Marcadas Canyon. The experience left me feeling a bit unsettled. Signs at the monument entrance juxtaposed ancient and modern ideas. A quote from a Native American said, “…the rocks are alive - they carry messages from the ancestors,” while a notice from monument staff informed us, “…cell phones can be used for a park ranger audio tour.” Those at each end of the time spectrum would be amazed by the world of the other. It felt somewhat disorienting to have a foot in each world. A cement-block retaining wall separated the back yards of new Pueblo-style tract homes from ancestral Puebloan ceremony sites. A short walk up the trail, modern civilization is left behind, only desert wilderness remains. On my own, I would never have stumbled across the small public parking lot, for the piedras marcadas, hidden in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

The husband-and-wife hike leaders, high-tech equipped with portable microphone headsets, warned us not to molest the rattlesnakes then explained that “desert varnish,” or the dark outer layer of weathered volcanic rock, was pecked away with a rock chisel to create the petroglyphs by revealing the natural, light-gray basalt rock beneath. On smooth rocks nearby, ceremonial food offerings were ground. Prayers were said. After the class ended, I continued walking by myself for an hour, spending time in the timeless. I’m haunted by the ancient/modern juxtapositions I felt as I walked on the land.

According to the Petroglyph National Monument website, Pueblo people today believe when their ancestors died, their spirits would travel from villages along the river up to the volcanic escarpment, “The Place That People Speak About.” There, the spirits of their ancestors would leave this world through the rock images and go to the next. They believe the images are as “old as time” and that the images choose when and to whom they reveal themselves.

Perhaps, while walking, I sensed energetically what I just read online in a 1990 L.A. Times article. Headline: “Petroglyph monument faces a rocky future. The ancient Indian drawings are threatened by Albuquerque's growth, trash dumpers and vandals.” The article described the nation’s newest national monument at the time as a vast gallery of sacred images. Ike Eastvold, President of the Friends of the Albuquerque Petroglyphs, stated, "It is still an outdoor church to the Pueblo people. This is still a spiritually active landscape." According to Eastvold, who inventoried the symbols for a state research project, a few of the monument's petroglyphs are 3,000 to 5,000 years old, some are from the Spanish colonial era, but most date from 1320 to 1680.

Since the city of Albuquerque is bounded by mountains on the east and Indian pueblo lands on both the north and south, future development has long been earmarked for the west mesa, where the petroglyphs are located. Although economic conditions and a building moratorium diminished the threat of development for a while, Eastvold explained the petroglyphs could still be vulnerable to deliberate destruction. He showed members of a Smithsonian Institution tour group where contractors had dumped hundreds of tons of construction debris while building neighboring subdivisions and pointed out bullet-pocked rock surfaces where marksmen had used petroglyphs for target practice. I’m wondering if my inexplicable feelings are from encountering the intensity of such starkly contrasting pairs of opposites reflected by the history of the  site: protection/destruction, ancient/modern, developed/undeveloped, respected/disrespected. . . all the contradictions we embody both individually and collectively as those who are human and divine. It's a familiar discomfort that parallels living in this country and this world at this time. The spiritual practice is to know the pairs of opposites are just two sides of one Earth rotating on its axis toward or away from the light.