9/23/18 National Public Lands Day

Saturday, September 23rd was National Public Lands Day, so visitors could come and see the park for free and we had some fun activities. This board has a question that was part of the day. Let me know if you have the answer!

Can you see the Great Blue Heron sitting on the rock in the middle of the stream? It was observing National Public Lands Day too! 

We set this picnic table up at the Contact Station. One the table are examples of Mimbres Art, yucca paint brushes, paint, and bowls to paint on.

These bowls were painted by visitors. The circle in the top righthand part of the photo is an example of Mimbres Art.

More examples of Mimbres Art. The Mimbres people created these designs on their pottery. We had paper bowls out so visitors could use a yucca paint brushes to paint a design on a paper bowl. (The paper bowl represented a clay pot.)

Another example of Mimbres Art.

And one last example of Mimbres Art.

These two rocks are a Mano and a Matate. The Mano is the smaller rock. The Matate is the larger rock.  The Mano is about 6 inches long and 4 inches wide. the Matate is about 10 inches long and 8 inches wide. These tools were used by Native American People to grind corn.
First you put about 10 corn kernels on the Matate. Next you use the Mano to squash the kernels so they break open. Then you use the Mano to grind the corn pieces into a kind of flour. The flour contains pieces of rock, so when the Native Peoples ate it it ground down their teeth! It also takes a lot of corn kernels to make enough flour to make bread because as you can see in the photo, lots of the flour goes into the pores of the rock!