As you probably know, the whole point of this blog post is that my family is traveling around the world in August 2016, but the annual bike trip to Fruita is the first step towards that direction. Instead of going to Fruita where we usually go we (we as in my family and my bestest of friends F and E and their mom and dad) went to Moab. On the first day that we were there we went on a canyoneering hike where we had a lot of fun! But hard too. I figure that we crossed four rivers, did three rappels, went under two rock tunnels, and one big canyon, also we saw some Anasazi petroglyphs and a forming arch. (See lulubelle’s “how arches are formed.”  🙂 ) After that we rested and had fun until then next day. Most of that was resting. The next day the children were informed that we were going on a bike ride, with another family who had joined us with two kids our age. We biked about 14.5 miles all of which were hard, about nine miles on slickrock. After that we were pooped and did nothing the rest of the day. The last day we were there we went up to the Arches National Park and did hike there and saw six cool arches.

Anasazi

So my mom said that I had to write about the Anasazi, the second generation of Native Americans that inhabited America before the settlers came. The Anasazi drew on the cave walls and on dark parts of rock that are still here today and as I mentioned earlier, we saw some too. A question asked a lot and that humans don’t know for sure is why they wrote petroglyphs, but the most believed reason is the reason that either they drew them to doodle, or more formal things like the sun hits it in a certain way that marks an equinox or something like that. Anasazi ate mostly meat but also berries and fruit they could scavenge. Eating like this is commonly known as the “paleo” diet. Anasazi had places to go while following the animals. Imagine it this way the Anasazi knew how the animals migrated and had places to stay along the migration path.

The Anasazi were not the first to build upright homes but they tunneled into the ground a little and made a room under the ground that was accessed by a ladder coming though the roof. The Anasazi lived in and around the Four Corners area (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) the Anasazi also later evolved in to the Pueblo people and created Mesa Verde. The Anasazi who lived there, in cliff dwellings, but later split up for some unknown reason.

below a Anasazi home

–happyfrog