Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [120]
In the late afternoon they trudged up the final stony rubble of the headwall, and into the pass—or onto it, as it was just as huge as the view from below had suggested: a deep broad U in the crest of the range, two thousand feet lower than the peaks marking each side of the U. These peaks were over a mile apart; and the depression of the pass was also nearly a mile from east to west, which was extremely unusual for a Sierra pass; most dropped away immediately on both sides, sometimes very steeply. Not so here, where a number of little black-rimmed ponds dotted an uneven granite flat.
“It’s so big!”
“It looks like the Himalayas,” Frank remarked as he walked by.
Troy had dropped his pack and wandered off to the south rise of the pass, checking out the little snow ponds tucked among the rocks. Now he whooped and called them all over to him. They stood up, groaning and complaining, and rubber-legged to him.
He pointed triumphantly at a low ring of stacked granite blocks, set on a flat tuck of decomposed granite next to one of the ponds. “Check it out guys. I ran into the national park archeologist last summer, and he told me about this. It’s the foundation of a Native American summer shelter. They built some kind of wicker house on this base. They’ve dated them as old as five thousand years up here, but the archeologist said he thought they might be twice as old as that.”
“How can you tell it’s not just some campers from last year?” Vince demanded in his courtroom voice. This was an old game, and Troy immediately snapped back, “Obsidian flakes in the Sierra all come from knapping arrowheads. Rates of hydration can be used to date when the flaking was done. Standard methodology, accepted by all! And—” He reached down and plucked something from the decomposed granite at Vince’s feet, held it aloft triumphantly: “Obsidian flake! Proof positive! Case closed!”
“Not until you get this dated,” Vince muttered, checking the ground out now like the rest of them. “There could have been an arrowhead-making class up here just last week.”
“Ha ha ha. That’s how you get criminals back on the streets of L.A., but it won’t work here. There’s obsidian everywhere you look.”
And in fact there was. They were all finding it; exclaiming, shouting, crawling on hands and knees, faces inches from the granite. “Don’t take any of it!” Troy warned them, just as Jeff began to fill a baggie with them. “It screws up their counts. It doesn’t matter that there are thousands of pieces here. This is an archeological site on federal land. You are grotesquely breaking the law there Jeffrey. Citizen’s arrest! Vincent, you’re a witness to this! What do you mean, you don’t see a thing?” Then he fell back into contemplating the stone ring.
“Awesome,” Charlie said.
“It really gives you a sense of them. The guy said they probably spent all summer up here. They did it for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. The people from the west brought up food and seashells, and the people from the east, salt and obsidian. It really helps you to see they were just like us.”
Frank was on his hands and knees to get his face down to the level of the low rock foundation, his nose inches from the lichen-covered granite, nodding as he listened to Troy. “It’s beautiful drywall,” he commented. “You can tell by the lichen that it’s been here a long time. It looks like a Goldsworthy.” Then: “This is a sacred place.”
Finally they went back to their packs, put them back on their backs, and staggered down into a high little basin to the west of the pass, where scoops of sand and dwarf trees appeared among some big erratic boulders. The day’s hump up the great wall had taken it out of them. When they found a flat area with enough sandy patches to serve as a camp, they sat next to their backpacks and pulled out their warm clothes and their food bags and the rest of their gear, and had just enough energy and daylight left to get water from the nearest pond, then cook and eat their meals. They groaned stiffly as they stood to make their