So now that I’m home and have gotten the Paisley Caves under my belt, I’m going to share the rest of my camping trip with you.

 We drove through the Modoc National Forest to get to our first destination, the Paisley Caves in Oregon. Driving through Modoc was kind of a treat; it's a place from pop culture that I've always wanted to visit.

 Mount Shasta loomed in the distance. There's a famous observatory up there, but that's not where we were going. Our first stop was a tiny town near the forest called Adin. Adin is pretty much what you'd expect a tiny frontier town to be. The general store-slash-restaurant had more trophy heads than products for sale, I think.

 Alturas was our next stop. It's right on the Oregon border and is the last place you can pump your own gas before you get into Oregon. In Oregon, it is illegal to pump your own gas. You have to get help from an attendant.

 Those are the Werner Mountains you're seeing in the distance. I got pretty good at taking pictures through a truck window.

It took us several hours to get to our campsite because we constantly stopped and looked at stuff. Stuff like roadkill. Some of that actually came home with us to skeletonize. While you try to get that out of your head, have some pictures of happy students around a campfire.

 The next day was Paisley; I already told you all about that. After the caves, however, we drove and hiked around and visited other sites. We found most of a cow skeleton in an open field. Naturally, we put it in the truck and took it home with us. We also found some really neat lichens.

 The last site we visited that day was the University of Nevada's field school. They had some fantastic finds, but one of the really interesting things they showed us was this backhoe trench taken by one of their geologists. See that thin pale line? That's a line of ash from Mt. Mazama, the volcano that erupted about 7,700 years ago and shot ash two miles into the atmosphere before becoming Crater Lake. This ash blanket went as far east as Utah and as far south as Las Vegas; nobody's sure how far west it goes.

 On the last full day, we drove through Nevada to stay at a place called Steven's Camp. It was at the end of a place called High Rock Canyon, and it took us many hours to get there. That whole 'constantly stopping' thing.

This is a plant known as yampa. It's got a variety of other names. It's pretty delicious- kinda nutty, kinda carroty. We pulled them out of the ground and ate them- one of our guest lecturers did his thesis on yampa growth patterns and paleoindian harvesting, so we thought we'd give it a try.

 All the white things are yampa flowers.

 After the yampa, our next stop was Surprise Valley. Surprise Valley is a paleoindian hunting site and lithic manufacturing site. You can't take two steps without finding an obsidian flake, and there's full points everywere.

 Hey look, more woodrat nests!

The real reason we stopped in Surprise Valley was to take a look at some prehistoric hunting blinds. These are horseshoes of stacked stone about a meter in diameter. They are located at a place called Cowhead Slough at the north end of Surprise Valley.

 Here's some of my classmates demonstrating how they work.

And here's two of my classmates pretending to be deer.

 This is buckwheat. Did you know its flowers were so pretty?

 This is a pretty common sight out here. Farmers put dead coyotes up on the fence to either scare away other coyotes or to brag.

In other news, we have a new coyote skeleton in our collection!

 I'll write a bit more about Steven's Camp later, but for now enjoy this picture of me cuddling a kangaroo rat, which is pretty much the best animal that exists.

 The last site we visited before we went home was a fossil bed home to a bunch of extinct rhinos and camels. Enjoy their bones!

 Actually, I take that back. Our last stop was Cedarville... which is either Nevada or California, I'm not sure. It's kind of an adorable place.

And then we were home!

Paisley Caves

While we visited several sites over the weekend, Paisley Caves is easily the most significant of them. The five rock shelters set into a basalt cliff face are the site of the oldest confirmed human occupation of North America- human coprolites were found and dated to fourteen thousand years ago. 

The calcined artiodactyl toe bone I’m holding below could be that old. It’s more likely that it’s only a couple thousand years old, but that’s still pretty dang old.

This is the oldest DNA evidence for the date of the earliest human arrival in North America, although this probably isn’t the oldest site. After all, the land bridge was between Alaska and Russia, not Russia and Oregon.

While this site definitively answers a question about how long this continent has been inhabited by humans, it does leave a few questions unanswered. One of these is the question of human dispersal. There are a couple of theories about the way we peopled the continent. One is the costal theory; the idea that after we showed up in Alaska, we trickled down broad areas the west coast of Canada and the northwest corner of the United States until we hit California and then headed east. We would have done this to avoid crossing over the bulk of the glaciers, which is very difficult traveling with poorer hunting opportunities and little availability of edible plants. However, proximity to the edge of the glaciers would have allowed ample chance to hunt the cold-loving megafauna. The other theory is the ice corridor theory, which has people moving along the spaces between glaciers and while still staying in the west, the coastal regions and their unpredictable weather patterns and fault lines were avoided. The Paisley site is located in an ice corridor and is close enough to the coast (relatively speaking) that it could be used as evidence to support either theory.


Aside from evidence of human activity, the faunal record here is rich. The area is heavily utilized by raptors; signs of owl, falcon, and eagle activity were heavily present. The golden eagles were the most obvious birds of prey at the site; they use the cliff face as a nesting site. By now, the chicks have fledged and we could see at least part of the population hunting in the far distance. We saw one of them on a phone pole coming in.

This meant that nobody was home and we could get a really good look at the nest without upsetting anybody too much.

We found many remains of the eagles’ past dinners, including rabbit parts and a pocket gopher skull. We also found the remains of larger animals, such as young pronghorn that the eagles could also have eaten.

The gopher skull

The area was also rich with reptiles. The lovely earring you see below is a long-nosed leopard lizard. She was incredibly bitey and irritated about being picked up.

The lady above was not the only leopard lizard we found that day. Later on, we also found a male in his breeding colors. See the orange spots? That's how you know.

 

Not all lizards were so non-compliant. The desert horned lizard, however, did not care about the cuddling. He was a handsome little fella and was very compliant with our attempts to identify him.