Tajanio Pinto Canyon- New Mexico State Trust Lands ( Organ Mountains Desert Peaks NM)

 This was a wandering on a very hot morning.  Before starting, as I paced around the immediate vicinity of the parking area, I foolishly looked up briefly to see the dust from my friend's truck as he approached. When I looked down I was about to step on a beautiful gray rattler in the 2 to 3 foot range. I let out a low yelp, but it didn't coil, or rattle. It just calmly moved away a few feet with only a brief backward glance. A little unnerving, but it definitely could've been worse. Still the whole enterprise was coming into question in my mind. We started out anyway. Saw another snake( not a rattler) as we walked a fence line. The green of the wildflower plants that covered vast areas of the desert in spring, was now a pale yellow. We crunched our way through them dispersing the dry seeds, watching lizards scurry as we went.  Crossing the live, green, thick and high grass that grows in the bottom of the canyon was a different task, one that we didn't have much enthusiasm for, given the earlier snake encounters, but we pushed through.

 We inspected a lone petroglyph among some boulders, that seemed to form an ancient hunting blind. A little while later, we found two grinding holes, one large, one small, in some boulders on the  side of a hill. Back down in the valley we started coming across pottery sherds, agate flakes and several metates spread over large area: a bonafide archaeological site. In a section where the dry creek ran through some  bedrock we found two more deep grinding mortars.

 I began to inspect a rocky ridge working my way toward what was supposed to be our destination: a promising looking collection of boulders below some cliffs on the east side of the  arroyo. Finding plentiful artifacts and several grinding mortars moments earlier gave me high hopes that we would encounter rock art on the boulders.
 I found nothing. The heat, and possibility of snakes seeking the shady recesses in the shrubs and overhangs, plus the creeping suspicion that this particular rock fall was not particularly old,  resulted in me not doing the most diligent of inspections, but I did give the area a good once over. I relied on one of my old adages when petroglyph hunting which goes something like this: " if they're not down low, probably not going to be up high," Broken faces of the big rocks, looked too fresh ( not like yesterday fresh, but probably sometime after ancient peoples were wandering around this area). Some older shrubs seem to have been pushed out of the way, rather than growing up in between the boulders, which had little patina for making images.
 As I left, there was the usual anxiety that I may have missed something, and since the likelihood of my returning was pretty low, it gave me pause for the  wistfulness that comes over me. Not for  long though,  for as the  sun  continued to pound down, thoughts of my air conditioned truck became the replacement. It's not like I haven't missed many things before. It's also not born out  in reality that I don't return to places, because I do, frequently.
 Later after walking for awhile, as I set my pack down to drink and eat a bar, I realized I was nearly standing on the remains of a large , orange-brown, ancient ceramic pot. The pieces scattered over a small area, the largest as much as six inches, probably could be  used to easily reconstruct the entire vessel. It was exciting to find, it was also bit sad, given its position sitting atop a fin of loose bare soil in the arroyo, because it wouldn't be long before it washed away, broken to smaller bits  to be buried in the sandy wash for another eternity. It was funny too. I sent my friend a waypoint of its location and as it turned out, he had stumbled upon the same pot on an earlier trip.

I trudged back along the fence line, where a hawk screeched its displeasure at me disturbing its perching spot on one of the posts.
 NOTE: Although this hike is within Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, it was almost entirely done on New Mexico State Trust Lands. It's a good idea to a have one of their recreation permits.