I'd love to see that. When a video surfaced a few years back, of the Santa Ana riverbed behind the Big A in Anaheim, it was much easier to share the video with family and friends who were unfamiliar than it was to try to explain what I was seeing (I stopped into that particular tent city a couple of times searching for an ill family member who contends with bouts of homelessness).
That would be the Colorado river. I did a trip like that two summers ago (on rafts rather than kayaks), and there's (essentially) no communication with the outside world. I did think about how I would react if there were some major world event, but I can only imagine what it feels like for them.
This just makes me picture big pipelines following (in reverse) the course of the natural watershed... some desal plants off the coast of S.F. or Marin peninsulas with pipes in through the Golden Gate and up the river delta and fanning out towards Sacramento and south to Fresno etc.
] LT. CHRIS CARLSEN WITH THE ALBUQUERQUE FIRE DEPARTMENT SAYS IT ONLY TAKES INCHES OF WATER IN AN ARROYO TO SWEEP YOU AWAY. Carlsen: "It doesn't seem very dangerous when it's hot and dry but it takes a very small amount of rain in the foothills or mesa to fill these channels up quickly." AND WHEN IT POURS AND THOSE ARROYOS FILL UP - THE WATER MOVES FAST AND GETS DEEP. LOOK AT WHAT THE WATERS HAVE DRAGGED DOWN THE CHANNEL, ALREADY THIS SEASON: Carlsen: "You can see the water can move concrete. We've had forklifts, vehicles come washing down the system." IF A PIECE OF HEAVY MACHINERY IS NO MATCH FOR THE RUSHING WATER ... NEITHER ARE YOU
> You don't need much more than a few inches to float logs.
To repeat the previous quote, "IT ONLY TAKES INCHES OF WATER IN AN ARROYO TO SWEEP YOU AWAY."
You can work out how a rough minimum required depth.
The paper says their test log is 22 cm in diameter = 8.6 inches and "timbers of at least 0.61 m diameter were used at Chaco as vertical support columns in great kivas", so 24 inches.
Pine greenwood appears to have a density about 700 kg/cubic meter so it looks the test log needs 5-6 inches of depth and the vertical support columns need about 1.5 feet. (I used the greenwood weight since you're going to waterlog the pine anyway. The dried density is only about 400 kg/cubic meter.)
That's a lot of water in dry New Mexico!
Oh, and your hypothesis requires that each one of the "white river shaped things" is that inches deep, to be able to float logs. They merge into the Coyote Wash, so that would be carrying a huge volume of water. But looking at the aerial pictures you can see it's never had regular huge flows like that.
Aslo, there's about a 600 foot rise from where Coyote Wash meets the Cacho River to Chaco Canyon proper, so there's a decent river flow. (A flow you saw in the photograph.)
In Three Men in a Boat they punt the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford. That's 100 miles, and a rise of <200 feet. This stretch of the Cacho Wash is 600 feet in 50 miles, so about 6x the slope, and thus a rather faster current than the Thames.
> How many examples are there of them choosing to carry heavy stuff when water transport was available?
That doesn't answer my question. If no one brought tens of thousands of logs upstream 50 miles by water using only manual labor than your appeal to history is bad logic. If you can't show people did it, you can't appeal to history.
Further, you've yet to demonstrate that appropriate water transport was available to the Chaco Canyon dwellers.
Further, the paper cites the archeological evidence that "that the people of Chaco used tumplines to carry a variety of materials (water vessels, maize, ceramics, chert, obsidian, turquoise, cacao, and even macaws) across a trading network spanning the San Juan Basin and beyond."
What evidence is there for your proposed transport method?
I was on a road trip throughout a lot of different parts of America last month. A park ranger in Big Bend told me that a tributary creek of the Rio Grande was a hundred feet wide, when normally you can just jump over it. A lakeside highway rest area in North Carolina was flooded up to a permanently mounted bench and trash can.
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