The Woodpecker of El Morro EarthCache
The Woodpecker of El Morro
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Located on El Morro National Monument’s Mesa Top Trail Loop
A reliable waterhole hidden at the base of a massive sandstone bluff made El Morro a popular stop and campsite for travelers. Ancestral Puebloans settled on the mesa top over 700 years ago. Spanish and American travelers rested, drank from the pool, and carved their signatures, dates and messages for hundreds of years. Today, El Morro National Monument protects over 2,000 inscriptions and petroglyphs, as well as Ancestral Puebloan ruins.
The posted coordinates take you to a point on the Mesa Top Trail Loop (The trail is a total of 2 miles in length)
The softness of the bluff’s sandstone made it easy for travelers to carve pictures, names, dates and messages. Ironically, that is also the reason that the famous inscriptions are slowly disappearing. This poses the ultimate challenge to the National Park Service mission of preserving the inscriptions in perpetuity while allowing natural processes to operate. Woodpecker Rock and surrounding bluff formations were sand dunes in Jurassic period. The dunes were eventually buried by sediment. The weight turned the dunes into stone (Zuni Sandstone). As time passed, the earth experienced some growing pains, causing the massive Zuni Sandstone formations to shift and crack. As water passed along these cracks, the cemented grains of sand began to dissolve causing the cracks to widen. As water deposited and froze in these cracks, the cracks widened even further. This erosion and widening eventually caused the sandstone to break away, which over time formed the rock formation we see today. December 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of El Morro National Monument.
To Log this EarthCache:
• Post a picture of yourself and/or GPS in front of Woodpecker Rock. Remember to stay on the designated trail and not to touch the inscriptions.
• E-mail the answer to the following: At the listed coordinates, what caused the round depressions on the rock wall to the south?
The above information was compiled from the following sources: • National Park Service, Trail Guide, El Morro National Monument.
Placement approved by the El Morro National Monument Staff.
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