Friday, January 20th, 2006 - Seminole Canyon, Texas.

Seminole Canyon State Park offered tours down to the Pecos River where we could see some pictographs from the Paleolithic Indian period, and we jumped at the chance. I mean, that's something you just don't get a chance to see everyday. The tour began at 10 a.m. and we descended about 200 feet to the riverbed and then walked an eighth of a mile or so over to a rocky overhang where bands of hunter-gatherers had lived for thousands of years. The setting was just as dramatic as the cliffs in Mesa Verde where the ancient Puebloans had built sophisticated buildings, but these nomadic Indians had of course not built anything permanent like that.

The pictographs were, however, astounding. Although many had fallen victim to crumbling of the limestone rock face, a large number were still in good enough condition that we could really take a close look at them. And what a wonderful phantasmagoria they were! The Shaman figure was quite prominent as you might expect since the pictographs were almost certainly done by the shaman for religious purposes. But rather than being realistic depictions of a human figure, they appeared to me to be highly stylized and abstract, reminding me a bit of the way figures are rendered by young children and in some modern art.

Most of the other designs could be interpreted as weird animals of one sort or another, but what intrigues me so much about these ancient Indian paintings is that I'm never sure if I have the right interpretation or am completely off-base (see Mesa Verde in Wanderung 3, for example). One animal looked like a giant millipede, but I really didn't know if that was supposed to be a millipede or some other religious message entirely.

After touring the two chambers we climbed back to the Visitor Center and started driving south to Del Rio and then east to San Antonio where we camped for the night. Along the way we observed an almost startlingly rapid change in the ecology. From Seminole State Park to Del Rio we still were in the American Desert type of ecology that we were well acquainted with after our week in Big Bend park. But from Del Rio east to San Antonio the ecology shifted from typical desert to occasional woods and pastureland to lots of trees with irrigated cropland in between. By the time we reached San Antonio we really seemed to be in a completely different ecological zone than when we had left in the morning, and since we travel quite slowly the distance wasn't all that great. We also started seeing distinctly Eastern birds like sparrows, purple grackles, and cardinals rather than roadrunners, quail, and the unusual desert species we had been observing for the last week.

Since our food stock had been severely depleted by our week in the Big Bend, when we arrived in San Antonio we took some time to go grocery shopping at an H.E.B. store recommended by the owner of our RV park. The store offered an excellent selection at reasonable prices, somewhat like the Wegman's chain in the Northeast U.S., and we were happy to find everything we needed there. We later found the H.E.B. headquarters building in a historic arsenal building along the San Antonio river walk. That evening we worked for a while on our computers in the usual way, read a bit more in Perry's "A Sudden, Fearful Death", the next book in the Inspector Monk series, and turned in for the night.