After reading the comments on my Monday
post about the collapsed structure we found at Kenosha Pass, it was clear to me that I had totally whiffed on trying to describe " Native American wickiups, lean-tos, or tipi-like lodges built of aspen poles like these" and needed to use some photographs. These two aspen pole wickiups are in Yellowstone National Park in a picture I borrowed from the National Park Service.
This wickiup, not in quite as good a shape, is located in Mesa County, Colorado. I borrowed this picture from the Dominguez Anthropological Research Group, which has a long running research project on wickiups. You can find out all sorts of information here about DARG's
Colorado Wickiup Project.
7 comments:
thankyou for the dominguez wickiup website. very interesting. along the lines of the wickiup or even tipi is what i observed many years ago while staying a while on the navajo res here in arizona. nearly all the cut firewood was stacked in tipi or wickiup style or leaning against a fence or structure. i found out it was stacked that manner to drain water or melting snow. then when the log was burned it was just placed in the firepit and the log was periodically pushed into the fire. i laugh cuz we gringos are more anal retentives. we gotta have our wood in precise cut lengths to stack in the cord manner! i noticed the same thing with a baja mexican pangero fisherman i stay with. one time i drove him from mulege to the hospital in tijuana. we camped at night at catavina and he cut long pieces of firewood and fed them into the fire to burn. a gringo would have to have all the firepit pieces "cut to size". more work for the gringo!
I love aspen.
When I die I want my ashes spread in an aspen grove:
http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/return-to-the-aspen-leaves/
I wouldn't let those Finding Bigfoot people see these.
They will definitely say there's a squatch in these woods!
Wickiups, maybe. The Utes left some of them scattered around the Colorado mountains.
Gosh, I hate to be critical here, but EVERYONE KNOWS that Bigfeets don't build wickiups! When they need shelter, they just summon a UFO, since it was them aliens that transplanted them here in the first place, and Bigfeets stay in telepathetic contacts with them. Which is why, of course, they is so hard to run to ground.....But really, could these structures be THAT old without rotting? Things must indeed be different that way out West--here in the Southeast, such a structure would be mulch in only a few years! I have built many a wickiup--including some more substantial ones with an earth covering--VERY comfortable dwellings! Warm and cozy with the smallest of fires in Winter, cool and comfortable in Summer. But mine needed rebuilding every few years, if they were not discovered and despoiled by civilized folk or developers before then....L.B.
.....But really, could these structures be THAT old without rotting? Things must indeed be different that way out West--here in the Southeast, such a structure would be mulch in only a few years!
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Lane, it is surprising how long things like this will last in our dry climate. A few years ago I helped a friend record a Navajo forked stick hogan on his property in San Juan County, New Mexico. It had fallen over, but all of the pieces were still there. We got a tree ring date from the hogan and it appears it was built in 1725. If you look in the DARG reports I link to in the post you'll see lots of Nineteenth century structures
That is incredible! No wonder archaeologists prefer working out West!....L.B.
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