At Work

I actually do work here at the Gila Cliff Dwellings and not just play – hike and travel the area.  Here are a few images form the ‘office’.

The Contact Station is where we greet visitors before sending them the 1/2 mile up to see the cliff dwellings and back down.  Sometimes this hike can be a bit challenging as noted by the image of the blacktail rattlesnake I had to guide people around the other day on the way down as he was hanging off a rock outcropping.  The Contact Station also contains our Natural History exhibits from the local Gila area.

 

We are all assigned a day that we give a daily tour of the dwellings.  On most days, though, we are giving informal interpretive tours, giving people as much or as little information as they would like.

 

 

The sketch I show here is one that I have been developing to add to the interpretive info we provide to people.  The sketch shows several of the rooms with adobe roofs added to them; the way they would have looked back then.  Presently the rooms no longer have the adobe roofs.

As we tell visitors, we suspect that the Calvary burnt the roofs back in the 1880’s, thinking that the local Apache tribes were living here, which there is no evidence that they ever entered the dwellings.  Modern Apache claim they would not have enter the dwellings.  The Calvary was here to protect the settlers (from the Apache who were, you might say, the ‘settlers’ living in the area).  This irony is not lost on most visitors – evident from them shaking their heads in disbelief.