Great Secrets of Our National Parks
Some of the best findings by accidental anthropologists and studied experts.
Categories: Featured Travel Stories , Photo Gallery
By: TW Editors 06/01/2008
Through blowing snow, a pair of cowboys rode across the top of a mesa, searching for stray cattle. Quaker rancher Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law Charlie Mason were not far from the family property below Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado on December 18, 1888, when they spotted “the grandest view of all among the ancient ruins of the southwest,” as Mason described it. The cowboys entered the Anasazi dwelling, which would come to be known as Cliff Palace, and over the next 20 odd years, the two would lead exploration parties into Mesa Verde.
Accidental anthropologists, like Wetherill and Mason, often help us uncover some of the greatest secrets unrecorded by history. Many are still waiting to be found, and if you are alert enough, your name may be part of the next newsflash. Just look at the two college students, 21-year-old Will Thomas and 20-year-old Dave Deacy, who were wading along the western shore of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, looking for a way to sneak into the annual Water Follies in 1996. Deacy hit his foot on something hard, picked it up and saw a skull staring back at him. The two hid the find in the bushes, went on to watch the highlight of the follies, the Columbia Cup hydroplane race, and then returned to their hiding spot and took the skull to the sheriff’s office. That skull turned out to be of the 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man.
Even if you never solve a mystery or reveal a hitherto unknown fact, you can at least relish in the discoveries of others and appreciate the lessons their finds have taught us. Shared here are little-known secrets of national parks across the West, uncovered by accidental anthropologists and studied experts.
Teddy Roosevelt, our cover boy and iconic symbol of our nation’s storied national parks, once said, “It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one’s sum of happiness if he or she grows to know, even slightly or imperfectly, how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.”
Enjoy the wonder-books of nature these passionate folks have left open for us to read.
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