Hunting for Archeology near Boulder CO, Day 2 - The Ron Steward Preserve on Rabbit Mountain

Another one of the types of places in CO that seemed worth exploring for arrowheads were a few spots marked "spring" on my topo map. I picked the furthest east foothill of the Rockies I could find. I figured that, in an arid environment, a spring would be a likely place to find signs of man. Sadly most of the "nature" around Boulder is fenced off to protect it from a bike-crazed culture. 

[A brief digression for social commentary: Boulder area is overrun with physical fitness enthusiasts. For them, nature is an extension of the gym - a place for vigorous exercise. Sadly they have no idea what to do outdoors. The rivers did not even have boat launches! It makes me contemplate trying some kind of outreach, to teach them about identifying flowers, birdwatching, archeology hunting, butterflies and moths.....the list goes on. One senses that a large number of New Yorkers relocated to this area, for the rock climbing and the overall hipness of the place. On the other hand, it has the least expensive and most excellent food I have had, anywhere in America.]

Driving up to the Ron Stewart Preserve, I started to notice stone walls:

The first spring we went to on Rabbit Mountain was public land, fenced off from the public. We got lucky and found some un-fenced public trails on the western side of Rabbit Mountain. 

Everywhere, there were suggestive bits of wall, propped rocks, and outlines on the ground. Was it purely ceremonial? I doubt it. This is the traditional homeland of the Arapahoe, who where a [displaced eastern?] Algonquian speaking tribe. One imagines them sharing some stone placing traditions with the New England tribes. But we were looking for arrowheads and thinking about hunters. All the walls I got to look at carefully were designed as funnels running up the sides of slopes.

We walked up the path a bit:

I kept noticing rock-on-rock, and little hints of stone wall. After thinking about it, I conclude that animals would prefer to not step on rocks, so even a sketchy wall is enough to encourage an animal to make a choice. In this last photo there is a bit of wall along the side of the path. You could suppose they tossed rocks over there while making the path. Or you could assume the wall caused the animals to walk along that side of the wall - creating a game trail which, today, is a human one.

We left the path at an outlook, heading down over slippery rocks to get a better look at a wall. It was rainy so what is apparently a very rattlesnake-y place was safe to scramble around. There was a big wall cutting across the slope:

The wall passes a pine tree, right of center. Just left of there, is a bare place on the hill with a scatter of rocks. That is a structure. Up close: 

It turns out that just below the pine tree, there is a gap in the wall and a short stretch just below that, blocking the gap - as I'll show in a moment. I wanted to believe this 'structure' was where the hunters waited. So the arrowheads and flaking debris would be under ground here. We should have stopped and looked more carefully. We should have climbed further up hill and examined the "pass". I was over-pre-occupied with the stone wall.

Here is the pine tree, the gap is below it.

Just below the gap was a short stretch of stone wall:

At the near end:

That looks like a path. I conclude, the walls are there for animal flow control. Look closely at this. There are little hints:

We did not see a single flaked rock. I was too busy looking at arranged rocks.