February 2, 2024
by David Ryan
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Wandering to the Picket Wire Canyon Dinosaur Tracks

Last weekend my dog Sparky and I finally made it to the nation’s (and perhaps the world’s) largest concentration of dinosaur tracks located at the bottom of Picket Wire Canyon in southeast Colorado. I learned about Picket Wire Canyon while researching the very impressive and accessible dinosaur tracks near Clayton, New Mexico for my upcoming book Wandering in the Clear Light of New Mexico.

This is only a small portion of the trackway. All of those holes are dinosaur tracks.

The Clayton and Picket Wire trackways are only 50 miles or so apart, as the crow flies, from each other, and both of them date back to around 100 million years ago or so during the Cretaceous geologic period. At that time much of the nation’s interior was covered by an inland sea. And dinosaur trackways are found in intermittent locations along what was the western edge of the sea all the way from Texas to Colorado.

This is the extent of the Inland Sea. Map courtesy of the National Park Service.

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December 28, 2023
by David Ryan
9 Comments

Wandering Through an Amazing Transformation in Globe, Arizona

Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post about looking for and climbing public stairways in the Globe and Miami, Arizona area. The two copper mining towns have hilly terrain that is perfect for stairways. (Here’s the link to that post.) But you’ll see in that post that the stairways were not in the best of shape and rarely used.

About a year and a half ago I learned of a local initiative in Globe to freshen up their stairs and to feature them in a local walk. In my email exchanges with Regina Ortega-Leonardi and Thea Wilshire (the women behind the initiative), I learned that there were concerns from the city of Globe about ADA compliance and liability and assumed that the initiative would die on the vine.

But I was curious enough to put the proposed walk route on my radar scope and planned to follow it the next time I drove through Globe. And with my book project now in the hands of the designer, my dog Sparky and I drove down to Globe earlier this month to walk the route and climb whatever stairways came along.

This is map that was developed when the walk was proposed. We opted to follow the longer Purple Route and started in the center of Globe.

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September 5, 2023
by David Ryan
9 Comments

A Brief Lesson in Wandering

I haven’t written many Blog Posts this year because I’ve been wrapped up in developing a book about places that you can only find in New Mexico and are compelling enough or important enough to warrant a drive across the country to check out. I hope to have the book finished by the end of the year.

But I did take a few days off this week to check out an Oscar Howe art exhibit in Brookings, South Dakota. On the way back, I hoped to hike to the top of South Dakota’s high point (Black Elk Peak) in the Black Hills. Unfortunately a heat dome parked itself over the Black Hills, and I decided that a 7-mile round trip hike in 90 degree heat would be a little too much for the dogs.

So I decided to head back to New Mexico and drove south through Hot Springs, South Dakota at the southern end of the Black Hills. Because I had been to the town’s huge hot spring swimming pool and to its incredible Mammoth Site several decades ago, I only planned to drive through town on my way home.

As I was driving through the old part of town, I noticed a gazebo surrounding a spring and a trail along a creek and thought that this would be a good place to walk the dogs. When I pulled into a parking area, I spotted a closed-down public stairway right in front of me. And this is where our brief wandering lesson begins.

The Gazebo

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