Montoya Butte. There is a Cañada Alamosa project site there, but we did not visit it.
We are looking back down the road towards the Victorio site we are going to visit.
There were pottery shards all over the surface. They must be left behind. Toni Laumbach is an expert in these ceramics and was able to tell us a lot about each piece picked up.
I didn't know what to expect at a site like this but most of it is in the state in which it was found. Karl pointed out many rooms that were only made visible by the rocks on the surface. As he says "three rocks in a row means a wall."
One of the rooms on which they have done a lot of work is protected by a cover. Here is Karl with a map of the site telling us about the room.
Here is part of the group (there were 20 of us) hiking back down from the Victorio site to the 5 trucks/SUVs that we were using.
We ate lunch on the O'Toole ranch. The O'Tooles own the land on which the 4 Cañada Alamosa sites were found.
After the dry Victorio site, we found Trudi O'Tooles studio building to be a comfortable place to eat and refresh ourselves.
A big cottonwood ("alamosa") provides shade. Up and down the valley we saw lots of tin-roofed buildings.
After lunch we climbed to the Pinnacles site. On the way Karl showed us rooms that had been terraced into the steep walls of the hill. This is a small sampling of the shards that have been found there. You can see that there are many different kinds.
Looking down from Pinnacle site at the Rio Alamosa, which flows year round. That is unusual in our short New Mexico experience.
I suspect that this is one of the Pinnacles.
This is one of the rooms built into the hillside. This particular room was exposed by pot hunters. "Pot hunters" is a four-letter word.
An informal classroom
Hiking back down from Pinnacles
A cottonwood along the ditch.
There is a ditch association that works together to keep the water flowing. We must have crossed the water/ditch 20 times on our trip. Since there were no bridges and the water was often deep, the drive itself was a real experience.