Walking with mammoths

So this blog post is somewhat out of temporal order...You may recall that the last Bragg Family South posting was a business trip I made in late April to western Arkansas.  This trip, to Waco, Texas, actually occurred a week before, but I've only now got time to post the pictures and narrative...  Well, as you can see, we went looking for mammoths!  The kids are pictured above with a life-size painting of a Columbian mammoth unearthed at what is now one of the newest gems in the National Park System--Waco Mammoth National Monument (https://www.nps.gov/waco/index.htm).  This national monument is a site found when some mammoth bones started washing out of a gully--turned out to be a large number of these Columbian mammoths (and some other animals, like camels) that got caught in a flash flood and buried thousands of years ago--the park displays and interprets the remains and this event:

Below is a cool old Texas live oak along the trail from the parking area to the excavation site:

As you can see in the picture below, the site is in an enclosed building to help protect the remains from the elements, which have been exposed as they were found--the elevated walkway helps to protect them from the visitors to the site:

The Columbian mammoth is less hairy than the woolly mammoth, which was found in more northerly (and, hence, colder) environments--the woolly mammoth is what roamed the Lake States during the Pleistocene.  While less hairy, the Columbian mammoth is the larger of the two species.  It is hard to convey how big these bones and tusks were:

Even having Stephen posing with one of the mammoth femurs (the upper big bone in the leg) doesn't really do it justice:

As you can see, this is a popular tourist spot, and isn't hard to find at all--it is right in the city limits of Waco...

We had another reason to visit this site...The young lady in the ranger hat below, Melissa Weih, is the daughter of some friends of ours from our church in Monticello...  

In our 16+ years in Monticello, we have gotten to see her grow from a young, shy, quiet girl into a confident college student and now a park ranger:

The excavations done to date were largely conducted by Baylor University scientists.  Baylor University is located in Waco, and they have a really nice museum complex (the Mayborn Museum) located on part of the Baylor campus:

We visited the Mayborn Museum, which (not surprisingly) included some further interpretation of the mammoth excavations:

but also have a number of local and regional exhibits and interpretive displays, including an old one-room school house, demonstrated by our future teacher Beth:

and a number of outbuildings and displays, including the small heritage garden plot below, ably interpreted by the this young lady, a student at Baylor:

On our way back from Waco, we stayed in the city of Palestine in eastern Texas.  Palestine is one of those towns currently suffering from the decline in oil revenues, but it had many pretty old homes and other buildings constructed during better times in the past, including the lovely Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where we went for mass that Sunday morning:

On our way through eastern Texas, we stopped a couple state parks, including Caddo Mounds State Historic Site (http://www.thc.state.tx.us/historic-sites/caddo-mounds-state-historic-site), which has several large Indian mounds and a really nice museum on this prehistoric village site: 

Just down the highway, following the historic "El Camino Real de los Tejas" (loosely interpreted as the "King's Highway" through Spanish Texas (then spelled "Tejas")) we visited another Texas state park, Mission Tejas (http://tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/mission-tejas).  This state park interprets a number of people, places, and events in this part of eastern Texas, including an early 19th century large dogtrot-style log home:

The "dogtrot" style refers to the cabin being separated into two sections (under one roof) by a passageway in the middle, sort of shown on the left of the picture below:

But the primary exhibit is a chapel built as a memorial to the original (much more crudely built from logs) Mission San Fransisco de los Tejas, a 1690 Spanish Catholic mission to the local Native Americans:

The original mission remained open only a few years; disease brought by the Europeans led to their Indian hosts driving them from the area.  The original structure was lost to time; the current chapel was actually built in the 1930s by the CCC, who embellished upon what was originally there, and added a number of interesting architectural accents, including the use of unique local building materials such as the fossil-encrusted stone floors:

A very friendly state park interpreter also pointed out how the CCC crews left their names and initials in the drying mortar--signatures, if you will, of their craftsmanship:

We finished the trip with a visit to Joshua and Heidi Adams, fellow forestry/wildlife academics and friends (they did a stint at UAM), at their home in Ruston, Louisiana.  Needless to say, we packed a lot into this very busy weekend!