FOLLOWING FOOTSTEPS ACROSS ANCIENT LANDS

Travelers specialize in following footsteps laid down before them. It’s unavoidable.

Sometimes it’s part of a larger plan and sometimes we don’t realize we’re treading ancient paths walked for thousands of years.

Take a stroll down unknown history with a walk along any river bank.

A travel plan for ancient land should include Paris because I’ve been there and back.

And it’s got a river.

Since my wife is a planning expert we saw Paris together in a different light.

From before a Roman settlement:

First known settlements in Paris during Mesolithic era, located near rue Henri-Farman in the 15th arrondissement.

To a Rick Steves tour:

The top pic is the view from the hotel window. One block of Paris notes to work from is not enough, but it shows a consistent theme.

I’m picking my new apartment out in these buildings, except mine is on the back side, the Eiffel Tower side.

From my window there’s a tower view of about one inch of the base. Last night it twinkled on the hour, a one inch twinkle.

And it’s a good inch.

Did I understand I was following footsteps on ancient lands while we picked our way down the local market street?

In Western Europe, the Early Mesolithic, or Azilian, begins about 14,000 years ago, in the Franco-Cantabrian region of northern Spain and southern France.

Does anyone register what that even means? Or how they do it?

Columbia River Barroom Talk

Two guys sit on bar stools drinking beer. Three empty stools separate them.

– I heard about the Columbia in San Diego. Some guy kept talking about this big river.

– It drains the northwest and starts on the east side of the Rockies.

– He talked about the flood.

– 1948?

– He said 10,000 years ago.

– Oh, right, the Bretz Flood.

– He said it was a dam break.

– An ice dam.

– Does everyone know this?

– They should know. Whatever was going on here 10,000 years ago was drowned. Some of the huge mounds in the middle of fields come from boulders frozen in huge icebergs and left when they melted. They’re called erratics.

The Willamette Valley was under water, an inland sea between the Cascades and Coast Range. That’s why it’s such fertile farm land from the silt left when the flood drained. Oregon even has a state dirt.

– Why don’t more people know this?

– If every ice age had an ice dam and a flood, everything’s been flushed out. The only history is the rock carvings, the pictographs and petroglyphs.

Following Footsteps Out Your Front Door

You don’t have to go far to find the old paths.

The places and stories that became Oregon had their beginnings amid cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, basalt lava flows, and powerful floods that shaped and reshaped the Columbia River landscape.

The archaeological record places humans in Oregon sometime toward the close of the Pleistocene, a time when ice-age glaciers were retreating from the mountain interior of the Northwest.

Archaeological finds in the Fort Rock area in central Oregon, The Dalles on the Columbia River, and on the Oregon Coast indicate that Homo sapiens were beginning to occupy several places in the region during the early Holocene epoch, from at least 12,000 years ago.

Make time for a walk.