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fotosbydavid

Updated: Jul 02, 2009 9:43am PST

Montreal Jazz Festival 2009 :

Montreal Jazz Festival 2009

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Favorites : Carlton's Favorite Travel Photos

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Steph-Carlton

Carlton's Favorite Travel Photos

Updated: Jul 01, 2009 8:13am PST

Travel Destinations :

Travel Destinations

Tracy McCrackin Photography

Updated: Jun 30, 2009 6:54pm PST

COLORADO - MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK : Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, offers a spectacular look into the lives of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. Today, the park protects over 4,000 known archeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. These sites are some of the most notable and best preserved in the United States.

To explore Mesa verde is to travel back through time. Crumbled villages on wide plains and tiny vulnerable homes perched high on rocky ledges intrique and stun us. Step into  a room a smell centuries old soot. Look out the window and appreciate the same views the original dwellers enjoyed. Small handprints seem to wave at us from high canyon walls. We  want to connect and wave back.

Mesa Verde national Park is truly America's premier archeological wonder. National Geographic Traveler named Mesa Verde as one of the fifty "must see" places of a lifetime. It is America's First World Heritage Site. hundreds of homes and villages have existed here for more than eight centuries, preserved and protected by overhanging cliff ledges. Their beauty and complexity speak eloquently of the ancient people who built them. No visitor can walk away untouched untouched by the buildings, the art, the people.

Mesa Verde is best known for a large number of well preserved cliff dwellings, houses built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along the canyon walls. The structures contained within these alcoves were mostly blocks of hard sandstone, held together and plastered with adobe mortar. Specific constructions had many similarities, but were generally unique in form due to the individual topography of different alcoves along the canyon walls. In marked contrast to earlier constructions and villages on top of the mesas, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde reflected a region-wide trend towards the aggregation of growing regional populations into close, highly defensible quarters during the 1200s.

Information on the above description and on some captions are from   http://www.nps.gov/meve/; Mesa Verde Travel literature; national Park Literature;   http://www.kidscantravel.com and Wikipedia.

THIS GALLERY IS UNDER CONSTRUCION

COLORADO - MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK

andresalvador

Mesa Verde, Spanish for green table, offers a spectacular look into th ...

Updated: Jun 30, 2009 1:44pm PST

South Africa : From Cape Town to Johannesburg via the Garden Route, Bloemfontein, Lesotho and Swaziland

South Africa

Fitz Carlile

From Cape Town to Johannesburg via the Garden Route, Bloemfontein, Les ...

Updated: Jun 30, 2009 8:03am PST

UTAH - ARCHES NATIONAL PARK, MOAB : Water and ice, extreme temperatures, and underground salt movement are responsible for the sculptured rock scenery of Arches National Park. On a clear blue sky days it is difficult to imagine such violent forces or the the 100 million years of erosion that created this land. It boast one of the world's greatest densities of natural arches. Over 2,000 cataloged arches ranging in size from a three foot opening, the minimum considered as arch, to the longest, the Landscape Arch measuring 306 feet base to base.

American Indians used this area for thousands of years. The Archaic people, the Puebloan, the Fremont and the Ute peoples, searched the arid desert for food animals, wild plant foods, and stones for tools and weapons. They also left evidence of their passing on a few pictograph and petroglyph panels.

The park lies atop an underground salt bed that is basically responsible for the arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins and eroded monoliths. Thousands of feet thick in places, this salt bed was deposited across the Colorado Plateau 300 million years ago when sea flowed into the region and eventually evaporated.

The information shown above are from the National Park literature.

UTAH - ARCHES NATIONAL PARK, MOAB

andresalvador

Water and ice, extreme temperatures, and underground salt movement are ...

Updated: Jun 29, 2009 3:50pm PST

Pisco Peru : Those images were taken why I was trekking on the Inca Trail!

Pisco Peru

Lin Jones

Those images were taken why I was trekking on the Inca Trail!

Updated: Jun 29, 2009 3:28pm PST

UTAH - ZION NATIONAL PARK : Zion National Park is located in the Southwestern United States, near Springdale, Utah. A prominent feature of the 229-square-mile park is Zion Canyon, 15 miles (24 km) long and up to half a mile (800 m) deep, cut through the reddish and tan-colored Navajo Sandstone by the North Fork of the Virgin River. Located at the junction of the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert regions, the park's unique geography and variety of life zones allow for unusual plant and animal diversity. Numerous plant species as well as 289 species of birds, 75 mammals (including 19 species of bat), and 32 reptiles inhabit the park's four life zones.

Human habitation of the area started about 8,000 years ago with small family groups of Native Americans; the semi-nomadic Basketmaker Anasazi (300 CE) stem from one of these groups. In turn, the Virgin Anasazi culture (500 CE) developed as the Basketmakers settled in permanent communities.[1] A different group, the Parowan Fremont, lived in the area as well. Both groups moved away by 1300 and were replaced by the Parrusits and several other Southern Paiute subtribes. The canyon was discovered by Mormons in 1858 and was settled by that same group in the early 1860s. In 1909, U.S. President William Howard Taft named the area a National Monument to protect the canyon, under the name of Mukuntuweap National Monument. However, in 1918, the acting director of the newly created National Park Service changed the park's name to Zion as the original name was locally unpopular. Zion is an ancient Hebrew word meaning a place of refuge or sanctuary. The United States Congress established the monument as a National Park on November 19, 1919. The Kolob section was proclaimed a separate Zion National Monument in 1937, but was incorporated into the park in 1956.

UTAH - ZION NATIONAL PARK

andresalvador

Zion National Park is located in the Southwestern United States, near ...

Updated: Jun 28, 2009 4:30pm PST

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