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After the Fire

Kay's Cabin excavations

...and after everything got crispy-crittered in the forest fire.

So we went back after the fires were put out. Well, after everything within a 50-yard radius of our site had been burnt to a blackened crisp. The fire was over the western ridge. The buckets we had left on site were VAPORIZED. Nothing left but handles. Our screens and wheelbarrows were also deep-fried. The plastic that we cover the site with had been mostly vaporized, but bits of it were melted in the deepest sections of the site and stuck to the rocks.

A poor bunny who died in the fire. There were a great deal of charred rabbit bodies lying about the place.
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The desolation that was once a pinyon/juniper forest.
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Here we are unloading the van, utterly disregarding the continued smoke coming from the west, a couple hundred yards from our site, and despite that we were downwind of it.
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Here we are hiking to the site. This is much easier to do now that there's no sagebrush scratching our legs. Compare this with the stream picture. What a difference a little fire makes!
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A wheelbarrow who gave its life in pursuit of archaeology.
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Another poor bunny. Note the cluster of nails welded together. They had been sitting in a bucket. The bucket was, like all its compatriots, completely incinerated.
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The lone archaeologist. Chris going site-seeing. Doesn't this look forlorn?
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And here we are, back to digging. This was taken shortly before the National Guard and the fire marshall showed up and asked us what the hell we were doing there.
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We showed the National Guard and fire marshalls around the site. They looked at us like we were crazed as we proudly displayed our Fremont pit houses and layers of occupation. The chopper pilot looked at me and said, "You're risking your lives for some holes in the ground and a few piles of rock?"

After ascertaining that we were not going to die in the next ten minutes, Dr. Janetski asked the chopper guys if they would take a picture of our site from above. Then they REALLY thought we were all nuts, and left pretty soon after that.
 
They let us stay, however, provided we stayed out of the small patches of vegetation that had survived to the west. So we continued digging as large planes flew overhead and dropped fire retardant a couple of hundred yards away.
 
The moral of this story is, archaeologists are wackos. If you want to be one of us, you've got to be a little bit off your rocker as well.