Travel to San Borja (Bountiful)

We decided to try to get to San Borja again, and hit it this time. Perhaps this is a potential site for Bountiful. We found walls, roads, a variety of fruit trees (including olives) as well as pottery shards. Again the vegetation was dense and interesting. A young man who works with INA (something like Instituto Nationale Anthopoligia—he is working on a dig at El Arco; Zach, I think this may be a good connection for us [his bosses at least]) walked us around indicating which things were Jesuit, Dominican, and pre-Jesuit. He maintains that many of the walls and roads were pre-Jesuit. There were cold springs and hot springs that were “cribbed” with rock and which I will attach pictures for with this email. (Kevin, my last email with images bounced back, so I don’t think you got them). I also took some video I can show at our next meeting.

Whether or not this is Bountiful, we certainly came away from what I now consider the most interesting site I have seen so far in the project. I took olive, pomegranate, grass, and bamboo samples for Rickmael. Kent, I think you would have had a heyday with this one! They are growing grapes, lemons, date and blue palms there as well. Lots of mounded earth and rock walls to inspect as well (One image I will include shows a section of wall that came down three weeks ago with an earthquake they had in the area). Water catchment systems that our young INA fellow thought were pre-Jesuit too . . . Zach, I think we need to get you there one way or another.

This is ATV country with super-washboardy roads that go inland 22 miles from the west (Mex #1 hwy-lots of room to park vehicles) or about 20 from the Bahia de los Angeles highway (not so much room to park vehicles). Linda actually found a pottery shard as we were walking and surrendered it to the young man. I’ll include images of those shards too. He had a piece of respaldo that looked like a cutting edge. He also had a large stone jug about 18 inches in height. He had made some others himself from the same kind of stone, but indicated this smaller jug was original to the area.

Anyway, you can see that we got excited about San Borja and think it is a worthwhile place to spend some time. Check out the pictures

Travel to San Ignacio (Zarahemla)

We went to the head of the lagoon where the irrigation canal begins and came back full circle into San Ignacio. We also went over to the west side where we climbed the big hill (and I was attacked by a cactus) back in November, but this time rode around San Lino (west side of town) and inspected the 3-foot high, 3-foot wide stone wall that is found on the west side of the river. (It looks like a long dark line on Google Earth, across the river from the Desert Inn where we stayed.) We took back roads from the west side all the way back to the Desert Inn again, crossing the river at the same spot that Kent, Otis Sr. and I did (after I had been half-baptized in Sidon!). It was very interesting to have covered so much ground with the ATV in a few hours in one day, but it gave me an appreciation of how much better we could get around using such vehicles.

We did not go further downstream before we decided to head back northward. Our brake problem that occurred last week meant that we skipped Bahia de los Angeles, so we decided to head back in that direction. Linda has been significantly traumatized by the narrow roads (not to mention my“inventive” driving), so we will not get over to Santa Rosalita or Loreto/San Javier this trip. However, I am determined to get their sometime in the next year . . .

Tomorrow we will get to Bahia and then down toward Bahia de Animus to look at a potential military outlook near the narrow neck. It was identified by the Erhle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason originator with a helicopter) group back in the 1960’s. Should be interesting.