No Public Access: Keep Out

Sometime in the 1970's I wandered off the beaten path in central New Mexico during one of my cross-country trips to the in-laws in California. I was looking for the ruins of Pueblo Blanco a site that had been acquired by the BLM a few years before and opened to the public. I found it and wandered the low wall and the arroyo that cut through the middle of it. But I had to get back to Oklahoma and my indentured servitude so I spent less than a half hour there. I put it on my very long list of thing to do when...

Well I retired 5 years ago and even though my wife is still working away in fourth grade, I have been working on that "to do when..." list.

So I went to the web and was going to look up the Smithsonian's monograph on Pueblo Blanco written by an archeologist back in 1914. He had made some good maps and I though they might help understand what I was looking at. The thing that had intrigued me most about the site was that the arroyo had actually created a kind of museum display by slicing through the ruins. You could walk down it and on the straight sides was a perfect profile of the rooms and other structures, plus the different stratigraphy that it had cut through. Fascinating.

What did I find? Well Pueblo Blanco has been closed to the public. If you can bribe or con a faculty from some university to take you there then you can see it while you are handcuffed and wearing special shoes so that no artifact will stick to your shoes. OK I made the handcuffs and the shoes up, but you get the idea.

Not only is this site closed, but every single historical sight including the pictographs, are off limits to the public now in the entire Galisteo Basin. Just too many vandals and pothunters, shard pickers and criminal types in the general public to risk that we might lose some information that future generations could understand.

Now I am not real sure what these fools plan to do about the arroyo. There ain't much you could do . Maybe a few million dollars from some kind of concrete diversion canal maybe. I can hear the laughter from all those New Mexicans now. Arroyos go where arroyos want to.

OK,OK, I read the law and the agreements about how you guys are going to "save" all these ruins and artifacts. But what fools you are not to allow the citizens of this country access to the treasures they own. Are we all just pothunters, vandals, shard stompers, and crooks? Saving until better days? Until you have funding to do something about it? Bullshit, you know deep down you are saving for yourself and those like you. You are the ones with the degrees and the knowledge, you're entitled, yes?

Well I am 62 years old. I can’t wait for the future. I have maybe 10 to 15 years of walking left in my knees, and my climbing days are already gone. I’m paying for your life style and I don’t like the way you are doing this. You think by keeping the general public out of place like this you will save it? Not bloody well likely in the long run, and you know it. The bad boys will get in there anyway, and the public won't be around to see them and say , "Hey..".

The Southwest is filling up with signs that say: NO PUBLIC ACCESS, NO TRESSPASSING, FEDERAL PROPERTY, AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, and so on and so on.

Paths and trails I once could walk are now strung with barbed wire fences with red white and blue signs of prohibition on them.

The sites that are open consist of sanitized places with asphalt sidewalks, which you may not get off of under penalty of great consequences. Museums are beginning to have more and more blank exhibits because some ” Native American” tribal governor has decided x, y, or z is too sensitive to be seen.


If I live long enough, I may laugh my ass off, when your precious sites are sold off secretly to Chinese land brokers as excess under utilized government property. But that won't really make me happy.

Then again,I might be over reacting to my disappointment and I may be overstating my case. Shit.