Winter Wetness, Herbarium Work, and Petroglyph Memories

The day started off cold but sunny.  By midafternoon now, it's quite cloudy and dark.  The weather radar shows that we're in for a wet evening.  The Nature's Notebook folks (not my rotation tomorrow!) will have a muddy time of it, but at least the rain will have stopped by morning.  

The plan is to meet up with Sheila Conneen to work in the herbarium.  We've got a large backlog of sheets to get into the cabinets in the correct order.  In fact, now that I've sorted the spread sheet, I see that we have 131 to file and only 128 in boxes.  We'll see how much we can get done in the 90 minutes she has.  

Also tomorrow, I need to track down the 21 trees listed on the BioPark's Tree Tour webpage.  Conveniently, there's a sketch map that shows approximate location, so finding the right tree should be easy.  

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As I was looking for photos to illustrate this post, I stumbled across 8-year old images of our expedition to Mesa Prieta, aka Black Mesa, with it's incredible petroglyphs.  Nephew Ty as a friend of the owner had access through the locked gate.  Kent, Ric and I had a grand time and the petroglyphs were some of the most spectacular I've seen anywhere. 

Upside Down Man probably represents someone important who has died, perhaps a shaman.  Easily 8' tall, it is a remarkable piece of stone art. 

There were numerous horned serpents with this one being about 15' long.  The tiny serpent on the right would be noteworthy if it were not overshadowed by the enormous one along the entire panel.