Nov 5--Church & Petroglyphs

Today was Sunday, so we attended the early service at Christ Community Church in Alamogordo.  It was a very good service, and it was good to worship with other believers.

After church, we drove about 30 miles north of town to the Three Rivers Petroglyph Monument.  Here we found a hill covered with rocks, and  a lot of the rocks had symbols, figures, geometric patterns,  etc. carved into them by those living here hundreds of years ago (the literature talked in terms of thousands of years).  We were told that there are over 21,000 in the area--we only saw a small portion.  The rocks appear to be a dark charcoal gray, but the surfaces that show when a rock has been broken show that the interior is a light gray with flecks of black throughout.  The figures were carved through the dark exterior layer so that the lighter interior of the rock creates the contrast.  Some are large & arresting, some are faint & easily overlooked, and you have to use your imagination as to what is portrayed in each.

This almost looks like a thunderbird.

 

I have no idea what this was meant to be, but it looks like a penguin.

At the other end of the area, there were several semi-restored dwellings of the people who lived in the area through the ages and created the petroglyphs. 

The oldest site that they found was just a pit in the ground.