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National Geographic : 1969 Aug
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excavating Wetherill Mesa ruins like Long House, Mug House, and Step House.* The project, one of the most thorough ever undertaken in the U. S., shed new light on the Anasazi-the "Old Ones"-who occupied this region for more than a millennium, then van ished about A.D. 1300. The research supports the theory that prolonged drought, much like our own Dust Bowl days, drove the Indians from the mesas. A new problem now threatens their dwell ings, clustered under overhanging cliffs. "Almost every afternoon the windows in this office rattle, and pictures start dancing on the walls," Park Superintendent Meredith M. Guillet told me. A landslide in February 1968 had cascaded across the entrance road near Point Lookout. Sonic boom-the same phenomenon that had struck the Air Force Academy-was the suspect. The Park Service and the Federal Aviation *See "Solving the Riddles of Wetherill Mesa," by Douglas Osborne, GEOGRAPHIC, February 1964. Agency have installed a recorder at Spruce Tree House to determine the intensity and frequency of the shocks. "With this informa tion, the offending air traffic may be rerouted away from the park. Eastern Plains Grow Crops and Cattle Blue-gray rain clouds cloaked the crests of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains ahead when I reached the rich San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. I passed miles of neatly ditched fields of potatoes and sun-burnished barley and windrows of drying hay. I drove on east to the High Plains, where the land lay parched as usual. Except for irrigated fields along the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers, this east ern third of the state is dry-farming country, where wheat is coaxed from thirsty soil and ranchers' windmills ceaselessly seek vagrant breezes to keep the stock tanks filled. Some 21/2 million cattle graze Colorado's plains and high mountain valleys and na tional forests, accounting for 60 percent of the 195
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