I Found 4,000 Year Old Walls in America’s Rocky Mountains b

A couple months ago, I learned of an area 12,000 feet above sea level that held an ancient past. An area with evidence of human occupation possibly as far back as 10,000 years. I was immediately intrigued and surprised that such a harsh environment had apparently harbored life for so long. The obvious questions ensued. Were they living at such high elevation or using it for some other purpose? Curious what might be there, I started looking around on Google Earth. And that's when I started to see them. There were numerous strange lines running across the ground, stretching for what seemed like hundreds of meters. I assumed they were man-made, but if so, what were they for and who built them? Knowing I only had a window before snow moved in and closed the mountains for the season, I made the long trip to the high country to see for myself what these were. What I discovered throughout this journey revealed an ancient past much more complex than I first imagined. Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in. So I'm up in the foothills. I haven't got up into the high peaks yet. There's some interesting looking rock formation over here. It looks like there's a couple of caves possibly on the bottom of it. I drove past it on this dirt road and I was just like, I don't know, you know what, I'm going to go check that thing out. So I'm going to try to find a way over there real quick. Oh yeah, there's the top of it through the trees. So this is probably one of them. I see a lot of a lot of bat guano, bat poop up in there. Oh yeah, the guano is so thick that I didn't realize at first, but yeah, this entire roof is blackened. So it seems to have sheltered people at some point in time. I'm going to be surprised if many generations of travelers over this route. So it looked like, yeah, it looked like this might be the front side. Oh yeah, this goes back. There's a bone there in the corner. Bone of what? I can't tell you. Yeah, a bunch of scattering. There's a bone in here. Definitely wood here that has been brought in. A lot of blackening up here. I don't see anything else that would give a hint as to when this was used. Like I said earlier, my guess is probably generations from cowboys, miners, Native Americans, you know, generations. Sometimes you just gotta scratch the itch of curiosity, huh? Pretty good sized herd of bighorn sheep feeding off the road here on the way up to the high country. In order to get where I needed to to start hiking, I had to climb a long ways along a dirt road. I knew I wouldn't reach the trailhead tonight, but I wanted to get within striking distance. All right, there's the mountains poking through. We are going to be above treeline before too long. A little bit rough. Still a little bit of fall colors hanging in. Well, I found a pretty good spot for camp here. Got a little creek right down here which is convenient because I need to grab some water. Man, it's great being in the mountains again. Let's get some dinner going. Everything about this trip was just getting out the door fast, so just a freeze-dried easy meal tonight. Well, I'm going to eat this and then head to bed. I want to try to catch sunrise up on the pass tomorrow, so we're going to be up pretty bright and early. Well, more like dark and early. All right, finally we are up top. It's a balmy 28 degrees up here. We are essentially on the continental divide. That sun is going to hit us eventually and warm us up a little bit. If you're not familiar with the continental divide, some like to call it the backbone of North America. It separates our watersheds. All streams and rivers east of the divide eventually flow into the Atlantic, and all those west of the divide make their way to the Pacific. Anxious to finally see what these Google Earth lines were and wanting to generate some body heat, I got moving as quickly as I could. It is very windy. I imagine the temperature gradients have to equalize. Okay, from some of the spots I marked on satellite, I think we're getting close. I was working along a ridgeline trying to locate this, one of my first pins of the day. This feature was particularly subtle. It's one of those you're not sure if it's something or not. So far this morning, I was having trouble deciphering anything unusual here. I don't see anything up here. Let's go work a little bit lower. So in doing reading and research about this area, in terms of estimates of how long it's been used by people, I generally saw about three different estimates. The first one said over 10,000 years, the other was about 10,000 years, and the other said about 8,000 years. So yeah, I don't know which one is true. It sounds like nobody does for sure. Safe to say it's been used for a really long time. Still no signs yet. According to some of my satellite imagery pins, we're getting pretty close, and the topography as I'm starting to look at it, it's starting to make a lot of sense. Huh, that might be, that might be first glimpse of them down there. It's hard to pick them out, as you can see. There's tons of natural rock here, and so it's just finding the man-made features can be a little bit tricky. Yeah, gosh, it is subtle. I really don't know that the camera even can pick up some of these subtleties, but it's just, yeah, I don't know how else to describe it except saying it's subtle. It just seems like it's been piled here. Oh yeah, okay, look at that. That's clearly a man-made hunting blind right there. So we had a hunting blind there. You can kind of make out the wall comes here, makes a turn right there, follows along here. You can see it runs out to somewhere out there. I was caught off guard by the site. Of course, I knew I was in the vicinity of what I came here for, but this wasn't one of my GPS pins. I actually hadn't noticed the site on satellite imagery. Afterwards, I looked again and located it. We're going to revisit this imagery, but the big picture first. When I saw these lines on Google Earth, I suspected they were part of a massive hunting system perfected here over thousands of years. If this was accurate, then I needed to identify a few different things here. First, I'd find hunting blinds close by, structures of rock where people could conceal themselves. Next, there would probably be some cairns or piles of rocks marking various features or directions. Perhaps most importantly, any man-made feature should be associated with animal behavior and topography in an easily identifiable way. If I didn't find these things, then I'd have to revisit my theory. I got to work analyzing the area. What's that? No, I thought that was a flake. This looks like another blind here. No doubt about that. I mean, multiple piled, multiple layers of piled rocks. Once again, looks out on the field. Of course, these walls have been here for centuries, maybe millennia, maybe lots of millennia. You never want to walk on them. You want to be careful you're not knocking them down. If you just saw one of these features by itself, you could very easily just overlook it. But it's like when you start seeing one after another after another all in the same area, it's like, okay, that's not coincidence and that's not natural. You can easily imagine crouching behind this thing and a herd of game running out there in that open field. And they would be moving left here. It seems like this pit is utilizing this huge boulder here. Again, it's just a great place to conceal yourself. There's a little cairn there. I don't really know. There may be a hunting blind pit there. It's not that obvious. Look at this. We've got, I'm sure, a fallen down cairn here. I mean, sometimes these cairns had a stick coming out of them to make them more visible. And for the people driving the herd over that slope, they would have needed some sort of a visual marker. You know, X marks a spot right in the center. That's where you're aiming. It's all here. At this point, I was confident I was in the middle of an ancient hunting complex on a scale unlike any I had ever seen before. Now, if you think this is just some rocks piled up by primitive hunters, you'd be missing out on the fascinating art of it all. This high altitude site was designed for groups of ancient people to secure large amounts of food. Their survival depended on the efficiency and effectiveness of this hunting site. Because of this, its construction is as genius as it is simple. So, let's break it down. Seeing drone footage of this site would be most profound. Unfortunately, where I'm currently at, drones are illegal. So, we'll use our grainy satellite and my analysis on the ground instead. Okay, so here's the imagery. I hiked in from this direction and started spotting blinds. They are faint, but you can see one here, another here, another there. Next, I walked out into the field. Roughly here is where I found that large cairn. Pay attention to the natural topography. Steep cliffs line one side of this. I mean, there's sheer cliffs stretching way back there all the way along here. So, the animals can't go there. Yeah, they could climb up all that steep stuff, steep rocky stuff if they wanted, but I was forgetting to take into account the hunting blinds up there. The ancient ones already had a solution for escapees up that slope. You see, they had a plan. The plan was to funnel these animals to their death. Down here, this is where the animals would be. That's a blind. That looks like a blind up on that little knoll. So, the animals, they're running the path of least resistance through here. They're doing what any animal or person would do if given the choice. They've avoided the steeper, rockier slopes, but little do they know, they are running into a trap here. Almost on cue. There's a bunch of, let's see, that's a little smaller. That might be deer. I've definitely, or it could be small elk. I was definitely seeing some elk droppings earlier. So, I just found this blind. I mean, talk about close quarters. I was just, I don't know, 15 yards. I mean, not far at all. The proximity of all this shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but I think just to see it in person, I mean, it's shocking. You know, it's like hand-to-hand combat with these animals. So, just to give you guys an idea, so I set the GoPro up on the edge of the hunting blind and really anywhere from there to, I mean, down this slope some, but this middle zone is probably like the main kill zone. If you imagine a bigger herd of animals, you can just see how tightly packed this would have been. There's the camera, my backpack. I've also noticed, as it's been so windy today, that the prevailing winds blow towards us, meaning the animals aren't going to catch human scent until you're basically, you know, on them. The funnel is just, I don't know, 25 yards up there. Let's go check it out. I mean, it just brings it all to life when you can see it here in front of you. There's another blind. It's the first one I've seen over on this edge here. It appears you've got sort of a faint line running up. I bet, let's go see, that might be the kill zone up here, the funnel. Let me help you see this. So, here's our site. The blind I just pointed out, close to the cliff. Now, the funnel that I'm talking about. Do you see it? Yep. I mean, here's another blind, and you've got this opening right here. Another blind right there. Oh, wow. Look, there's like, holy cow, there's blind, blind, blind, blind. So, these are those blinds from up top. One, two, three, four. It's fascinating because it all makes so much sense. You have a lot of blinds, more blinds on this upper slope than down there. You know, down there I saw two, you know, maybe there's a third one off to go take a look. Because, again, the animals, they're not going to run off the cliff to their death. They're going to start pushing up this way. Of course, that's where hunters are waiting. They're coming towards this way. Here's the funnel. Blinds over here, blinds over there. This is the major kill zone right here. If you haven't identified the funnel yet, let's take a look. So, here's our site. We've got the impassable cliffs on the bottom, the steep, rocky hillside with hunting blinds up top, the open field, the path of least resistance here. Where does it all lead? Check this out. Hunting blinds all over the place here. See this wall of sorts and a less noticeable one here? Notice how the wall disappears. There's an opening here. That's the funnel and that's not by accident. So, this is the funnel of death right here. So, this is the closest blind. The next blind where my tribe's people would be is right there. And man, they're just coming through here. There's the remnants of a cairn right out there and they're just coming, running through the breach here. Roughly 20 feet wide. Gosh, imagine the animals converging in that. Approximately 20 feet from one side of the funnel to the other right there. That's all. Just imagine the carnage coming through here. Oh wow, look at this. There's a big old...what is that? Almost on cue, huh? Some sort of a socket here. I don't know how long bone would last out in an alpine environment like this, given the size. They've got to be elk, I would assume. Time has worn it down, but you can tell this all along here used to be probably a fairly substantial wall. This whole system is stunningly simple, yet brutally effective. There's numerous features at play here and what's fascinating is that similar types of ancient game drives have been found all over North America, even as far north as the Arctic, where natives built systems like this for hunting caribou. I don't think I've said it yet, but I suspect this site was used for bighorn sheep, elk, and maybe deer. When Europeans first started seeing these sites, they were a novelty and some recorded their findings. This historical sketch from the 1700s shows a similar trap to what we are looking at today. This one was used for bison, but it sheds a lot of light on our site. Right away, you'll notice the funnel shape. Along the edges are walls of brush, maybe with stone underneath. We clearly have a lot of stone in play here, but very likely, at one point in time, there was organic material, like branches here. It would have made these walls more formidable and intimidating for animals. So there's the funnel. So I'm curious to keep working up the slope and seeing what we find. Look at that. That's definitely stacked. This might be another cleanup zone. Let's take a look. Oh, this might be another one. I was trying to pay attention, like, which way are they oriented? You know, it looks like they're looking downhill. So the other kill zone is over in that region. I mean, there's another, like, major cluster. Oh, wow. Yeah, I just picked out a faint wall right there. Yeah, you can trace this thing out through there. It's crazy to think how many years these rocks may have been in place here. I mean, this wall, you can faintly make it out. This thing runs a long way, basically all the way to the drop-off, as far as I can tell. Up and over the ridge there. Pretty wild to imagine, and then juxtapose it against our lives in this modern world. A few hundred yards upslope from the initial site, I finally located the lines that had brought me here in the first place. It's hard to do these walls justice. This is drone footage from another similar hunting site. I filmed it after the fact, and although this isn't what we're looking at, it gives you an idea of how the walls are constructed and oriented with the topography. So how old is all of this? Well, conveniently, an archaeologist who watches the channel recently reached out to me. He studied similar sites to these and shared some information. Many of these game drive sites in the Rocky Mountains were used off and on for the past 4,000 years, with the most heavy usage being the last 2,000. But there have been some pieces of evidence found that would date some of them beyond 8,000 years. However we look at it, we're talking a long, long time. The second site ended up being significantly bigger than the first, maybe double in size. The same features played out here and really showcased how large scale this whole operation was. As I hiked back to my car, it was impossible not to marvel at what these people accomplished. They survived and thrived in this landscape for a long, long time.