Meet our Guests: Elizabeth Parra

Elizabeth Parra

Interpretive Ranger, Texas State Parks

Hueco Tanks State Park, TX

11/5/21

Elizabeth Parra works as a State Park Ranger at Hueco Tanks State Park, near her hometown of El Paso, Texas. Elizabeth grew up camping and hiking with her family in a nearby forest, Ruidosa, which inspired her love of science and natural world. As an adult, Elizabeth works to help people emotionally connect with the natural resources around them. “It’s super special when you see someone out here, young or old, and they go ‘Wow, I never knew.’”

The Hueco Tanks area is ancestral land to many different communities, including the Jornada Mogollan, Mescalero Apache, the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, Comanche, and Kiowa peoples. Hundreds of Jornada Mogollan petroglyphs are tucked away in corners of the mountains at Hueco Tanks. “What makes this place special is the geology and the amount of human history we have here,” Elizabeth says.

Part of Elizabeth’s job is to protect cultural resources like the petroglyphs from damage. However, visitors have carved into walls containing petroglyphs in numerous areas around the park, resulting in a separation of Hueco Tanks into self-guided and ranger-guided tours. Over the past two years, new graffiti has increased, as the pandemic has brought greater crowds into the park. Elizabeth says that the desire to protect the pictographs from other writing is based on their historical importance and the effort that went into creating them. “A lot of these images are grounded in ceremony, tradition, their own historic record as well — compared to me buying a Sharpie at Walmart for five dollars and just writing my name.”

By Emma Fletcher-Frazer

Meet our Educators: Joe Pachak

Joe Pachak

Artist & Archeologist

Bluff, UT

10/01/2021-10/08/2021

     “We don’t take this,” says Joe Pachak, holding a pre-historic chisel in his right hand. As an archeologist, Joe recognizes the importance of leaving artifacts in place, their story and context intact. He has been searching the red rock desert for indigenous remnants since he was a young boy roaming Pueblo, CO with his father.  Joe has made home the small town of Bluff, UT working as an artist. With an attentive eye and a kind demeanor, he offers detailed interpretations of rock art pecked into the sandstone panels of Sand Island, along the rim of an oxbow of the San Juan River, Wolf Man, and The Procession. He explains that the petroglyph styles on the panels are Basketmaker, Ute and Glen Canyon Linear. 

Westies hike with Joe over sandstone slabs, stopping to look at flakes, pottery sherds or rusted milk cans. Joe sees charred rocks and determines a pit where a fire burned centuries before. He points to carvings of animals and people desert bighorns playing flutes, snakes, processions on stone – stories from centuries before etched into rock. Every step with Joe is intentional: “we’re walking in the remains of a culture.”

The teachings he has learned from Native American cultures are significant to him. He contributes to documenting panels through drawings and sketches. Each year, Joe constructs wooden sculptures to burn as a symbol of renewal. A pair of 28-foot-tall ravens were burned last winter solstice.To Joe, it is creativity that will “make us actual.” It will help us “find out who we are as individuals and a community.” Placing the chisel back where he found it, he grins, “I say let’s go look at rock art.”

By Neave Fleming